*  M 


IMVIW 


H  ]      : 
I    j  UJ^IxiV   1 


HMMW 


7^*1, 


I/  '9* 
j  >  7  * 

1, 2  'f^ 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR. 


The  Nursery  Lesson  Book.  A  guide  for  mothers 
in  teaching  young  children.  By  PHILIP  G.  HUBERT, 
Jr.  Fifty  easy  lessons,  each  lesson  combining 
simple  and  progressive  instruction  in  reading, 
writing,  arithmetic,  drawing,  and  singing.  Octavo, 
boards,  75  cents. 

"  It  is  hard  to  decide  which  will  learn  most  from  this  book — 
the  mother  or  the  child.  The  author  has  the  kindergarten  idea, 
but  applies  it  without  a  mass  of  formulae.  A  subject  is  introduced 
by  name  and  picture,  and  a  few  questions  are  given  ;  with  these 
and  such  others  as  the  child  is  sure  to  ask  the  mother  is  expected 
to  develop  the  faculty  of  inquiry,  which  in  ordinary  schools  is 
severely  let  alone.  The  pictures  are  drawing  lessons,  and  as  all 
are  in  outline  the  child  will  have  no  difficulty  in  following  them. 
The  book  is  admirably  adapted  to  its  purpose."— A'.  Y.  Herald. 


LIBERTY  AND  A  LIVING 


THE  RECORD   OF  AN    ATTEMPT   TO  SECURE 
BREAD    AND    BUTTER,    SUNSHINE    AND 
CONTENT,   BY   GARDENING,    FISH- 
ING, AND  HUNTING 


BY 


PHILIP   G.  HUBERT,  JR. 


"  That  I  may  accomplish  some  petty,  particular  affair  well, 
I  live  my  whole  life  coarsely.  Yet  the  man  who  does  not 
betake  himself  at  once  and  desperately  to  sawing  is  called 
a  loafer,  though  he  may  be  knocking  at  the  doors  of  heaven 
all  the  while,  which  shall  surely  be  opened  to  him.  I  can  see 
nothing  so  holy  as  unrelaxed  play  and  frolic  in  this  bower 
God  has  built  for  us." — H.  D.  THOREAU. 

"  The  royal  peace  of  a  rural  home." — W.  S.  WARD. 


NEW  YORK  &  LONDON 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S    SONS 

®{jr  finuktrboclur  fjrtsg 
1889 


COPYRIGHT  BY 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
1889 


ttbe  fmfcfeerbocfecr  press,  flew  J?orft 

ElcctrotypeJ  and  Printed  by 
G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

I. — INTRODUCTION  :  THE  PROBLEM  TO  BE  SOLVED,  i 

II. — A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE      .  6 
III. — SOME  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO 

NOTHING  A  YEAR 16 

IV. — THE  SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD    ....  26 

V. — WHAT  MY  CRITICS  WILL  SAY    ....  40 

VI. — HOME 50 

VII. — DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN      .        .  65 

VIII. — WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS    ....  90 

IX. — WE  GO  A-FlSHING 105 

X. — MY  BEES •  127 

XL — "  DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE  "      .        .        .  145 
XII. — THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING  —  HENRY  DAVID 

THOREAU 163 

XIII. — WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN    .        .  191 
XIV. — THE    DANGERS    OF    CUTTING    LOOSE    FROM 

TOWN  DRUDGERY 229 


LIBERTY  AND  A  LIVING. 


THE  PROBLEM  TO  BE  SOLVED. 

IT  may  be  well  to  say  at  the  outset  that  by 
*  the  word  liberty  I  do  not  mean  idleness,  the 
two  having  no  connection  in  my  mind.  By 
liberty  and  a  living,  as  contrasted  with  work 
and  a  living,  I  mean  the  getting  of  bread  and 
butter,  clothes  and  shelter  for  my  little  ones 
and  myself  by  the  exercise  of  common  skill  in 
gardening,  fishing,  shooting,  and  other  out-door 
sports.  This  entails  no  anxious  work,  no  tedi- 
ous grind  of  routine  in  dusty  towns  and  musty 
offices.  It  is  life  in  the  sunshine.  It  gives 
bread  and  butter,  and  contentment,  if  not  for- 
tune. It  offers  health  and  opportunities  for  in- 
tellectual recreation  beyond  the  reach  of  most 
men  under  our  present  system.  Life,  to  the 
average  man,  means  hard,  anxious  work,  with 
disappointment  at  the  end,  whereas  it  ought  to 


2  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

mean  pleasant  work,  with  plenty  of  time  for 
books  and  talk.  There  is  something  wrong 
about  a  system  which  condemns  ninety-nine 
hundredths  of  the  race  to  an  existence  as  bare 
of  intellectual  activity  and  enjoyment  as  that 
°^  a  norse»  and  with  the  added  anxiety  concern- 
ing  the  next  month's  rent.  Is  there  no  escape? 
Throughout  years  of  hard  toil  I  suspected  that 
there  might  be  such  an  escape.  Now,  having 
escaped,  I  am  sure  of  it.  So  long  as  I  can  get 
a  house  and  garden  for  three  dollars  a  week, 
so  long  as  oatmeal  is  less  than  three  cents  a 
pound,  so  long  as  the  fish  bite  and  the  cabbages 
grow,  I  shall  keep  out  of  the  slavery  of  modern 
city  existence,  I  shall  live  in  God's  sunshine  and 
enjoy  my  children's  prattle,  my  books  and  papers. 
For  a  good  many  years  I  worked  hard  at 
newspaper  correspondence  and  miscellaneous 
writing  without  doing  more  than  keep  my  fam- 
ily in  the  most  modest  way  of  life.  I  went  to 
my  desk  early  and  remained  late.  Year  after 
year  I  dreamed  of  the  day  when  my  bank  ac- 
count should  be  large  enough  to  allow  me  at 
least  a  few  months  for  that  out-door  work  and 
sport  I  love  so  well ;  yet  the  day  of  rest  seemed 
to  grow  more  distant  rather  than  nearer.  Grad- 


THE  PROBLEM  TO  BE   SOLVED.  3 

ually  this  idea  took  possession  of  me  :  Why  is 
it  not  possible  for  a  healthy  man,  yet  strong 
and  in  the  enjoyment  of  youth,  to  make  bread 
and  butter  for  his  little  ones  and  himself  with- 
out chaining  himself  down  to  a  life  of  drud- 
gery, without  passing  most  of  his  time  away 
from  those  he  loves,  without  devoting  his  life  to 
work  which  is  drudgery,  which  is  hard,  which 
tells  upon  a  man's  vitality  day  by  day  ?  What 
am  I  good  for?  At  what  work  which  does  not 
require  a  daily  routine  in  a  city  office  can  I 
make  enough  money  for  our  simple  life  ?  By 
degrees  these  questions  began  to  assume  a  per- 
sonal importance.  Was  it  possible  that  I,  with 
my  horror  of  the  city,  its  bustling  monotony, 
its  petty  concern  for  inanities,  could  find  work 
which  would  offer  me  freedom  and  bread  and 
butter?  I  wanted  no  work  which  would  keep 
me  in-doors  from  the  beginning  of  April  to  the 
end  of  December,  no  work  which  would  every 
day  compel  me  to  say  good-bye  to  my  children 
in  the  early  morning.  Of  course  such  a  life 
must  be  found  in  the  country,  if  anywhere,  and 
in  country  occupations.  To  some  people  this 
might  mean  in  itself  misery.  To  me,  with 
my  love  of  sunshine,  it  is  otherwise.  During 


4  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

the  years  when  I  was  tied  to  a  desk  from  morn- 
ing till  night,  the  very  sight  of  the  agricultural 
papers  among  my  exchanges,  even  in  the  dead 
of  winter,  was  sufficient  to  make  me  feel  like 
throwing  business  overboard  and  getting  into 
country  life,  even  if  nothing  better  than  potato 
raising  presented  itself.  At  the  same  time  that 
I  thought  and  talked  about  the  miseries  of  city 
life  I  was  by  no  means  blind  to  the  dangers  of 
the  country. 

Any  attempt  to  cut  loose  from  city  life  in 
summer  might  result  in  the  city  cutting  loose 
from  me  in  winter.  Where,  then,  would  be  my 
music,  my  opera,  my  theatres,  my  lectures? 
As  a  newspaper  man  I  had  become  accustomed 
to  all  these  things  as  a  part  of  existence.  As  I 
had  lived  for  years  in  the  heart  of  the  conti- 
nent's life,  the  quiet  of  a  country  winter  might 
pall  upon  me,  and  when  the  papers  brought  me 
news  of  great  events  in  the  world  of  art  I  might 
feel  that  I  was  losing  more  than  I  had  gained. 
And  my  friends  and  acquaintances  were  not 
slow  in  pointing  out  to  me  that  even  if  I  worked 
hard  and  intelligently  as  a  farmer  I  could  not 
be  sure  of  making  a  comfortable  living;  and 
their  picture  of  a  farmer's  life  made  much  of 
early  rising,  long  hours  of  work,  bodily  exhaus- 


THE  PROBLEM  TO  BE  SOLVED.  5 

tion,  an  unceasing  battle  with  Nature,  and  a 
gradual  relapse,  intellectually,  to  the  level  of 
other  farmers — good  men,  perhaps,  but  dull- 
witted  in  all  matters  not  connected  with  crops 
and  stock.  My  friends  predicted  that  a  year  or 
two  of  farming  would  result  either  in  the  loss 
of  all  interest  in  literature,  science,  and  art,  or 
I  would  become  heartily  sick  of  country  life  and 
eager  to  get  back  to  town  at  any  cost.  I  would 
find,  they  said,  that  books  and  magazines  lost 
their  interest  after  a  day's  work  in  the  fields  ; 
that  gradually  there  would  be  less  talk  about 
art  and  music,  and  more  about  corn  and  calves. 
The  life  of  hard  physical  labor  would  end  in 
blunting  the  intellectual  perceptions.  I  recog- 
nize perfectly  the  existence  of  such  dangers, 
and  that  is  one  reason  why  I  should  no  more 
think  of  ordinary  farm  life  for  myself  than  I 
should  undertake  to  compete  with  an  Irish  la- 
borer in  the  raising  of  potatoes  for  market.  The 
question  resolved  itself  into  this:  Is  there  an 
occupation,  or  are  there  occupations,  in  which 
a  fairly  intelligent  man,  willing  to  work,  can 
make  a  living  in  the  country  without  resorting 
to  the  exhausting  labor  of  the  farm,  for  which 
he  is  physically  unfitted?  I  determined  to 
make  experiments. 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE. 

"V^ESTERDAY  one  of  my  neighbors  died, 
killed  by  an  accident.  A  rich  man  who, 
in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  or  of  that  little  bit  of 
it  in  which  we  move,  had  attained  every  thing 
that  man  could  wish  for.  Beginning  life  a  poor 
boy,  he  made  a  large  fortune  by  dealing  in  lard. 
He  was  looked  up  to  in  the  lard  trade ;  his 
judgment  upon  lard  was  final.  A  religious  man 
in  the  hackneyed  sense  of  the  word,  he  had 
done  much  for  the  sect  to  which  he  belonged, 
and  was  cited  as  a  model  layman.  He  gave 
large  sums  to  churches  and  church  colleges,  and 
contributed  to  the  fund  for  sending  missionaries 
to  foreign  parts.  As  a  family  man,  as  a  hus- 
band and  father,  he  was,  for  all  that  I  know,  an 
exemplary  person.  I  never  knew  him  to  smile; 
but  severity  of  expression  may  have  been  con- 
stitutional. With  his  large  wealth  he  built 
himself  a  pleasant  though  commonplace  home, 
the  house  surrounded  by  large  grounds,  in 
6 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE.  J 

which  a  dozen  gardeners  were  kept  busy.  When 
not  too  tired,  it  was  his  practice  to  stroll  through 
his  grounds  and  garden  in  the  cool  of  the  even- 
ing. But  his  attachment  to  his  country  home 
in  New  Jersey  was  not  such  as  to  keep  him 
from  going  to  the  city  every  day  in  the  year 
except  Sundays  and  legal  holidays  ;  it  was  his 
boast  that  he  never  took  a  vacation,  poor  man. 
At  half-past  seven  in  the  morning  his  carriage 
took  him  to  the  station,  and  at  six  o'clock  in 
the  evening  it  took  him  home  again.  He  was 
a  bank  director  never  known  to  miss  a  board 
meeting  ;  and  when  he  died  the  directors  of  his 
bank  had  resolutions  printed  in  several  news- 
papers deploring  the  loss  which  the  institution 
had  suffered.  "  He  died  in  harness,"  said  one 
of  his  fellow-directors  to  the  reporter  of  a  news- 
paper, "a  representative  American  business 
man.  His  knowledge  of  the  lard  market  was 
wonderful ;  he  could  give  you  off-hand  the 
day's  quotations  in  lard  for  Chicago,  Buenos 
Ayres,  London,  Paris,  and  Timbuctoo."  A 
man  without  an  idea  beyond  lard  and  discounts, 
he  was  an  important  figure  in  the  community. 
Books,  art,  music,  were  nothing  to  him  ;  and  if 
a  man's  name  was  not  a  good  one  to  have  upon 


8  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  back  of  a  note,  that  man  was  not  much  to 
him  either.  The  other  day  his  coachman 
allowed  the  reins  to  slip>  the  horses  ran  away, 
and  the  rich  man,  in  trying  to  get  out,  was 
killed. 

My  personal  acquaintance  with  my  rich 
neighbor  was  but  slight,  and  of  a  business  char- 
acter. One  June  morning,  when  all  Nature 
was  rejoicing,  it  became  my  duty  to  look  into 
some  complaints  made  by  citizens  as  to  stenches 
supposed  to  come  from  the  neighborhood  of 
the  Hudson  River  at  a  point  where  several 
slaughter-  and  rendering-houses  were  situated 
in  violation  of  public  health  and  decency.  I 
remember  particularly  that  it  had  been  hard 
work  for  me,  young  and  strong,  fond  of  out- 
door work  in  the  sunlight,  to  leave  my  pretty 
Jersey  home  that  morning,  to  tear  myself  away 
from  my  garden,  with  its  strawberries  in  bloom, 
from  the  river,  upon  which  my  little  boat  nod- 
ded an  invitation  to  sail ;  to  leave  my  children, 
clamorous  for  a  day  in  the  woods  or  on  the 
water.  But  duty  in  the  shape  of  an  investiga- 
tion into  these  evil  smells  took  me  to  the  sta- 
tion, confined  me  for  nearly  an  hour  in  a  hot 
railroad  car  along  with  some  hundreds  of  other 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE.  9 

unfortunates,  and  sent  me  to  an  unpleasant 
part  of  the  city.  It  happened  that  my  rich 
neighbor  was  interested  in  property  in  that 
neighborhood  ;  his  firm  bought  the  refuse  of 
the  slaughter-houses,  in  order  to  transform  it 
into  good  lard.  Naturally,  I  asked  him  as  to 
the  origin  of  the  complaints.  He  knew  noth- 
ing of  their  origin,  but  he  was  quite  sure  that 
certain  rendering-establishments  with  which  he 
did  business  were  not  to  blame  ;  and  to  prove 
it,  he  proposed  to  take  me  over  them  and  show 
me  what  nice  places  they  were.  I  agreed. 
When  within  a  block  of  the  accused  establish- 
ments, the  stench  borne  on  the  wind  was  sick- 
ening. My  neighbor  thought  nothing  of  it ;  he 
went  there  every  morning,  and  was  accustomed 
to  it.  Having  reached  some  rendering-cellars 
beneath  the  slaughter-houses,  my  neighbor 
pointed  out  how  cleanly  every  thing  was  man- 
aged :  the  fat  and  refuse,  fresh  and  nice,  was 
dropped  directly  from  the  abattoir  into  great 
steam  vats,  in  which  it  was  melted.  My  neigh- 
bor assured  me  that  such  was  the  care  taken 
with  every  thing  that  he  himself  never  missed 
making  a  morning  visit  there.  Standing  in 
half  an  inch  of  fatty  mud  and  water,  he  sur- 


IO  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

veyed  the  scene  with  a  pleased  air,  and  asked 
me  whether  I  smelt  any  thing  except  the  natu- 
ral odors  of  a  rendering-house. 

Many  times  since  then,  when  fortunate 
enough  to  steal  away  from  business  for  a  few 
days,  and  able  to  sail  about  in  my  boat  and 
teach  the  children  how  to  fish,  I  have  thought  of 
my  highly  respected  neighbor,  and  wondered 
whether  he  still  paid  his  daily  visits  to  that 
horrible  place.  From  what  I  know  of  his  do- 
ings I  am  pretty  sure  that  he  did.  "  He  died 
in  harness,  like  a  true  American,"  said  his  fel- 
low bank  directors.  Very  often,  as  I  trudged 
home  from  the  river  in  the  bright  September 
and  October  evenings,  my  little  ones  strong 
with  a  whole  day's  water  sport,  and  all  of  us 
full  of  the  day's  joy,  my  rich  neighbor  would 
be  driven  quickly  by  on  his  way  from  the  rail- 
road station.  Probably  he  had  made  hundreds 
of  dollars  that  day,  while  I  had  made — what  ? 
Had  he  paid  too  much  for  his  money  ? 

I  have  another  neighbor,  by  no  means  a  rich 
man,  and  by  no  means  looked  up  to  in  the 
community,  in  fact,  scarcely  known,  except  to 
the  few  who  meet  him  out  fishing,  or  who  buy 
crabs  and  oysters  from  him.  He  is  a  jolly  old 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE.    1 1 

negro,  a  man  of  sixty  years  of  age,  some- 
thing of  a  philosopher,  with  the  resources  of  a 
Yankee,  and  the  irresponsibility  of  a  tramp. 
With  his  wife  and  children  he  leads  the  life  of 
fisherman  and  gardener.  His  nets  give  him  all 
the  fish  he  needs  and  to  sell ;  his  garden  patch 
supplies  him  with  vegetables  for  the  year ;  in 
summer  he  is  his  own  master,  refusing  persist- 
ently to  work  for  others ;  in  winter  he  works 
for  others  if  work  presents  itself,  but  as  the 
pork  barrel  is  deep  and  vegetables  plenty,  his 
actual  need  of  money  is  small.  Oysters  he  can 
have  for  the  getting.  This  man  has  a  genuine 
love  of  the  sunlight  and  of  untainted  air. 
When  I  sail  him  a  race  for  home,  and  we  ar- 
rive wet  with  the  spray  which  the  breeze  has 
thrown  at  us,  he  is  the  first  to  proclaim  his 
keen  enjoyment.  He  has  never  known  what 
the  heat  and  dust  of  a  city  mean  ;  nevertheless, 
he  values  his  life  almost  as  much  as  I  did  my 
brief  vacations.  Something  also  of  a  natural- 
ist in  his  way,  he  does  not  disdain  to  carry 
home  with  him  such  queer  sea  products  as  may 
interest  him  or  his  grandchildren.  Spending  al- 
most no  money,  his  income  is  actually  larger 
than  his  expenses,  and  he  is  able  to  pay  a  small 


12  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

life  insurance,  and  to  put  by  something  for  the 
day  when  oysters  may  be  scarce  or  rheumatism 
may  get  the  best  of  him.  For  forty  years  he 
has  been  following  this  life.  He  is  not  a  pop- 
ular man  with  his  fellow-watermen,  because 
absolutely  indifferent  to  the  attractions  of  the 
village  grog-shop,  and  more  fond  of  his  family 
than  of  gossip.  His  days  are  given  to  his  gar- 
den and  his  fishing ;  his  evenings  to  the  study 
of  our  county  agricultural  journal,  which  gives 
him,  in  condensed  form,  the  news  of  the  world 
as  well  as  the  latest  directions  as  to  planting 
onions. 

Thinking  about  my  neighbor  who  died  the 
other  day,  and  my  other  neighbor  who  still 
lives  to  catch  fish  and  enjoy  the  sea  breezes,  I 
can  scarcely  repress  the  desire  to  sympathize 
deeply  with  the  one  who  got  so  little  out  of 
life.  I  know  that  such  sympathy  would  be  re- 
ceived by  his  friends  and  fellow  bank  directors 
with  amazement.  Was  he  not  rich  and  respect- 
ed ?  Did  he  not  die  in  harness  ?  What  more 
can  a  man  want  ?  And  if  I  timidly  suggest 
that  there  is  a  joy  about  lobster  catching  in  an 
October  breeze,  or  even  in  oystering  in  Decem- 
ber, far  beyond  the  pleasure  of  making  money 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE.    1 3 

out  of  lard,  some  eminently  respectable  people 
I  know  will  doubt  my  sanity.  Take  two  men, 
one  of  whom  follows  the  life  of  my  late  re- 
spected and  rich  neighbor,  making  existence 
one  long  strain  for  money,  and  finally  dying  in 
ignorance  of  every  thing  but  the  price  of  lard 
in  Chicago,  Buenos  Ayres,  London,  Paris,  and 
Timbuctoo  ;  on  the  other  hand,  take  my  poor 
neighbor,  who,  when  he  comes  to  die,  will  not 
even  be  mentioned  by  the  newspapers,  whose 
name  no  bank  director  ever  saw  on  the  back  of 
a  note,  who  knew  nothing  about  the  price  of 
lard  except  at  the  corner  grocery,  but  who  en- 
joyed fifty  years  of  sport,  of  gardening,  of  fish- 
ing, and  of  out-door  happiness.  Which  of  these 
two  men  got  the  most  out  of  life  ?  Does  the 
knowledge  of  the  price  of  lard,  or  an  obituary 
notice  in  the  newspapers,  or  the  esteem  of 
Tom,  Dick,  and  Harry  atone  for  the  loss  of  all 
sport  ?  Does  the  man  who  makes  a  fortune 
accomplish  so  much  for  the  world  that  his 
own  happiness  or  ease  should  not  be  allowed  to 
weigh  in  the  balance  ?  Civilization  tends  to 
the  importance  of  the  individual.  The  middle 
ages  saw  thousands  compelled  to  labor  for  one 
lord  and  master  ;  to-day  each  man  is  considered 


14  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

as  entitled  to  some  share  of  the  good  things  in 
the  world,  and  even  women  and  children  are 
coming  forward.  In  the  distant  future  each 
man  will  consider  that  the  day  is  made  for  him, 
and  that  he  who  fails  to  enjoy  himself — that  is, 
to  use  the  gifts  of  nature  rationally — is  a  fool. 
Civilization  should  mean  emancipation  from 
drudgery,  and  unquestionably  man  will  some 
day  cease  to  labor  in  the  present  meaning  of 
the  word.  When  machinery  attains  to  such 
perfection  that  the  ground  is  ploughed,  the 
seed  is  sown,  the  crops  are  tended,  watered, 
gathered  without  the  work  of  man  ;  when 
power,  light,  heat  are  so  cheap  as  to  be  as  free 
as  air  to  every  one,  actual  labor  to  provide 
food,  raiment,  and  shelter  need  be  but  slight. 
At  present  we  put  a  fictitious  value  upon  labor 
as  a  moral  exercise  apart  from  results.  One 
hundred  years  ago  our  Puritan  ancestors  doomed 
here  and  hereafter  the  man  who  held  to  any 
but  the  most  dreary  and  dreadful  beliefs  ;  sun- 
light, moral  as  well  as  physical,  to  them  partook 
more  or  less  of  the  nature  of  sin.  To-day  we 
are  in  danger  of  erring  similarly  with  regard  to 
work.  One  fetish  is  taking  the  place  of  an- 
other. I  deny  that  the  man  who  prefers  his 


A  RICH  POOR  MAN  AND  A  POOR  RICH  ONE.    I  $ 

lobster  boat  to  the  banker's  desk,  who  would 
rather  know  the  habits  of  the  clam  than  the 
price  of  lard  in  Chicago,  New  York,  and  those 
other  places,  is  in  danger  of  deterioration,  or 
that  his  example  is  vicious.  Let  all  the  world 
follow  your  advice,  say  the  wiseacres,  and  we 
should  drift  back  to  savagery. 

That  eminent  financier,  Mr.  Jay  Gould,  is 
said  to  have  remarked,  in  a  fit  of  depression,  or 
perhaps  in  an  attempt  to  discourage  envy  of 
his  millions,  that  his  money  gave  him  nothing 
more  than  some  clothes  to  wear,  a  house  to 
live  in,  and  some  little  luxuries.  Some  of  my 
critics  will  undoubtedly  exclaim  :  "  Look  at 
Gould.  Does  he  not  enjoy  the  sea  breeze  in 
his  yacht,  and  all  the  pleasures  of  nature  ?  " 
Perhaps  he  does,  in  a  difficult  sort  of  way,  fil- 
tered through  flunkeys,  so  to  speak.  But  of 
the  young  men  who  are  tempted  to  keep 
their  noses  at  the  gilded  grindstone,  how  many 
will  attain  to  the  dignity  of  a  yacht  ?  How 
many  will  die  in  harness  long  before  they  think 
it  possible  to  stop  work  and  begin  to  play  ? 
How  many  will  lose  all  capacity  for  the  enjoy- 
ment of  life  before  their  pile  of  gold  is  big 
enough  ? 


SOME   EXPERIMENTS  IN   LIVING  ON   NEXT   TO 
NOTHING  A  YEAR. 


of  the  great  features  of  most  of  the 
books  in  favor  of  living  upon  nothing  in 
the  country  consists  in  the  table  of  expenses, 
showing  at  the  end  of  the  month,  or  quarter, 
or  year,  where  every  penny  has  gone.  I  have 
quite  a  collection  of  such  books,  beginning 
with  "  Ten  Acres  Enough,"  and  ending  with  a 
little  volume,  issued  within  the  last  year,  de- 
scribing how  a  lady  managed  to  live  in  comfort 
and  even  pay  rent  upon  an  income  of  $150  a 
year.  After  much  consideration  and  the  prepa- 
ration of  many  tables  of  the  kind,  showing  the 
expenditure  from  day  to  day,  from  week  to 
week,  and  month  to  month,  I  confess  that  I 
do  not  see  how  such  tables  as  I  can  give  will 
help  any  person  who  wishes  to  make  the  ex- 
periment. It  is  too  much  a  matter  of  what 
people  consider  the  necessaries  of  life.  Mr. 
Roosevelt,  in  criticising  "  Ten  Acres  Enough," 
16 


LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO  NOTHING  A    YEAR.     I/ 

says  that  Mr.  Morris,  the  author  of  that  famous 
book,  must  have  allowed  his  wife  and  daugh- 
ters to  go  naked  for  more  than  five  years,  be- 
cause, in  his  account  of  expenditure  at  the  end 
of  the  book,  not  a  word  is  said  as  to  the  cost 
of  clothes  ;  which  leads  me  to  say  that  while  I 
might  consider  myself  perfectly  happy  with 
$20  worth  of  clothes  a  year,  another  man  might 
think  it  necessary  to  spend  $100,  and  his  wife 
three  times  that  amount.  I  like  to  wear  a  flan- 
nel shirt  of  a  rough  kind  nearly  all  the  year 
round,  and  although  the  fashion  is  growing, 
some  excellent  people  still  consider  the  flan- 
nel shirt  a  badge  of  social  degradation.  My 
children  are  dressed  in  the  coarsest  and  plain- 
est fashion,  far  too  coarse  and  too  plain  for 
most  city  people  to  think  proper.  I  work 
my  own  garden  ;  I  sail  my  own  boat ;  I  rake 
my  own  oysters  ;  all  of  which  work  many  men 
I  know  would  consider  beneath  them.  They 
have  no  more  taste  for  such  work  than  for  the 
class  of  books  with  which  I  occupy  my  even- 
ings. My  house  is  plain,  and  the  living  plainer. 
I  infinitely  prefer  that  the  dinner  shall  be  of 
one  course,  and  the  talk  of  music,  books,  and 
art,  than  that  there  should  be  ten  courses  to- 


1 8  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

gether  with  inane  twaddle.  I  once  knew  a 
family  in  which  there  were  many  children, 
where  the  cardinal  rule  at  meals  was  that  noth- 
ing must  be  said  about  the  food  upon  the  table, 
about  the  petty  concerns  of  the  house  and  gar- 
den, or  of  the  people  in  the  neighborhood.  So 
far  as  possible  the  conversation  was  to  be  di- 
rected to  some  book  in  hand  at  the  time,  or 
some  matter  of  public  interest  of  the  day.  If 
the  children  were  too  young  to  take  part  in 
such  talk,  they  were  to  say  nothing.  Of  course 
there  is  a  ridiculous  side  to  any  such  scheme, 
and  reminiscences  of  Doctor  Blimber,  with  his 
maddening  "  The  Romans,  Mr.  Feeder,"  will 
occur  to  most  people.  Nevertheless,  there  are 
good  points  about  such  a  practice,  even  if  it 
now  and  then  leads  to  absurdity.  If  we  adults 
are  talking  of  woman  suffrage,  when  Arthur, 
aged  six  years,  interrupts  with  the  remark  that 
his  goat  swallowed  a  tennis-ball  that  morn- 
ing, the  conversation  may  not  be  so  consecu- 
tive as  it  might  be  ;  nevertheless,  it  is  far  better 
to  have  woman  suffrage  up  for  debate  than  the 
quality  of  the  corned-beef  or  the  potatoes,  or 

the  cut  of  Mrs. 's  new  dress.     I  have  found 

by  experience  that  systematic  effort  is  essential 


LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO  NOTHING  A   YEAR.     19 

in  order  to  begin  any  such  reform  as  this.  As 
I  shall  have  occasion  to  say  elsewhere,  without 
some  effort,  the  evening,  after  a  long  day  out- 
doors in  the  wind  and  on  the  water  or  in  the 
woods,  will  prove  a  drowsy  and  unprofitable  one. 
A  few  weeks'  earnest  determination  not  to  let 
one  evening  pass  without  the  reading  aloud  of 
some  magazine  article,  or  of  a  certain  number  of 
pages  of  some  book  worth  reading,  will  result 
in  permanent  enjoyment ;  the  sense  of  exertion 
will  disappear.  There  is  a  good  deal  to  be  said 
in  favor  of  the  life  of  routine  in  which  every 
hour  is  laid  out. 

To  return  to  the  tables  of  expense  again, 
some  people  might  think  that  our  bill  of  fare 
for  breakfast,  lunch,  and  dinner  meant  semi- 
starvation.  We  have  been  educated  to  like 
oatmeal,  for  instance,  and  breakfast  seldom 
varies  from  oatmeal,  bread  and  butter,  coffee, 
and  eggs.  For  lunch  there  is  sometimes  fish 
or  oysters,  or  fruit,  or  a  bit  of  cold  meat.  And 
for  dinner  we  have  fish  or  meat,  plenty  of 
vegetables,  and,  almost  invariably,  fruit  or  the 
simplest  kind  of  pudding.  I  know  that  such  a 
bill  of  fare  would  not  please  many  people.  It 
is  low  living,  at  all  events,  if  not  high  thinking. 


2O  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

Probably  books  and  magazines  cost  us  as  much 
as  our  dinners  throughout  the  summer.  Never- 
theless, I  have  made  out  this  little  table,  com- 
piled from  the  expense  accounts  kept  with 
scrupulous  care  for  the  eight  months  beginning 
with  the  first  of  May  and  ending  with  the  first 
of  January : 

Rent  (for  the  whole  year)     .....  $160  oo 

Wages 100  oo 

Grocer's  and  butcher's  bill  .  .  .  .  .  128  oo 
Expenses  upon  garden,  boat,  house,  including 

tools,  paint,  repairs,  seeds,  etc.      ...  35  oo 

Coal  and  wood 25  oo 


Total $448  oo 

This  shows  a  total  of  $448,  or  an  average  of 
per  month.  To  offset  this  sum,  I  have 
only  to  show  as  coming  from  the  place  the  in- 
significant sum  of  $43,  made  up  by  sending 
surplus  eggs  to  the  grocer's,  and  giving  what 
vegetables  and  hay  I  did  not  need  to  a  neigh- 
bor. There  is  also  a  small  sum  to  be  credited 
to  my  bees.  Taking  the  expenses  of  the  sum- 
mer, therefore,  and  counting  the  summer  at 
eight  months  of  the  year,  and  leaving  out  the 
money  which  went  for  clothes,  books,  etc.,  and 
small  extras,  we  have  an  outgo  of  $50  a  month. 


LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO  NOTHING  A    YEAR.     21 

To  me  the  life  is  delightful.  Having  $50  a 
month  from  sources  outside,  there  is  no  anx- 
iety. I  am  not  at  all  sure  that  even  were  my 
$50  a  month  income  suddenly  cut  off  I  should 
not  attempt  to  make  that  amount  by  doubling 
or  quadrupling  the  size  of  my  garden  and  go- 
ing into  raising  small  fruits,  chickens  for  market, 
etc.,  perhaps  living  a  little  more  simply  than 
we  do  now,  simple  as  this  life  is. 

Here  I  can  see  that  my  sympathetic  reade^ 
the  man  or  woman  tired  of  paying  out  to  the 
landlord,  the  butcher,  and  the  grocer,  every 
penny  that  comes  in,  tired  of  seeing  the  children 
weak  and  puny,  and  anxious  for  a  more  whole- 
some life  than  the  city  affords,  is  still  dissatis- 
fied. "  Where,"  he  exclaims,  "  even  if  I  have 
enough  capital  to  realize  an  income  of  $600  a 
year  necessary  for  this  country  life,  am  I  to  get 
amusement  ?  I  must  go  to  the  city  for  a  few 
months  in  winter  in  order  to  hear  a  little  music, 
to  see  a  few  good  plays,  to  see  the  world,  to 
hear  the  buzz  of  life  ;  my  children  must  go  to 
school ;  they  cannot  grow  up  fishermen  or  mar- 
ket gardeners."  This  is  a  serious  part  of  the 
problem  and  cannot  be  ignored.  In  my  own 
case  it  happens  that  I  can  go  to  the  city  for  a 


22  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

few  months  in  the  depth  of  winter  and  make 
enough  money  to  pay  my  way  during  those 
months,  going  back  to  my  country  life  when 
the  spring  opens.  Nevertheless,  after  a  fair 
trial  of  several  years  of  this  kind  of  life,  much 
country,  and  little  city,  had  I  to  choose  to- 
morrow between  giving  up  one  or  the  other 
entirely,  between  devoting  myself  wholly  to 
making  every  penny  out  of  my  garden  and  my 
poultry-yard,  never  going  to  New  York  at  all, 
except  for  a  day  or  two  once  or  twice  a  year, 
or  beginning  again  the  city  life  of  incessant 
work,  of  anxiety,  of  late  hours,  and  bad  air, 
with  its  compensations  in  the  way  of  more 
money,  better  clothes,  amusements — between 
these  two  lives  I  should  not  hesitate  for  a  mo- 
ment. The  country  life,  as  I  make  my  life, 
gives  me  out-door  work,  which  is  now  a  physi- 
cal necessity,  gives  me  more  light  and  air,  gives 
me  my  long  evenings  before  a  wood  fire,  and 
entire  freedom  from  worry  or  business  anxiety. 
My  friends  may  say,  and  do  say,  that  without 
my  few  weeks  or  months  in  the  city  there  would 
occur  inevitably  a  rapid  deterioration,  mentally. 
They  are  kind  enough  to  hint  that  at  present  I 
am  better  than  I  might  be.  At  all  events,  they 


LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO  NOTHING  A   YEAR.   23 

say,  if  I  do  not  lose  all  interest  in  the  higher 
things  of  life,  gradually  being  absorbed  in  the 
details  of  vegetable-raising,  poultry-keeping, 
oyster-raking,  and  duck-shooting,  my  children 
will  suffer  and  sink  to  the  level  of  the  country 
people  around  them.  This  is  a  serious  matter. 
It  would  be  a  matter  of  sincere  sorrow  to  me 
if  my  boys  and  girls  grew  up  without  the  tastes 
of  educated  men  and  women.  But  I  do  not 
believe  that  any  thing  of  the  kind  will  occur. 
I  do  not  believe,  as  I  have  already  said  else- 
where, that  a  boy  or  girl  brought  up  among 
people  who  read  and  talk  about  things  beyond 
the  village  world  will  fail  to  absorb  something 
of  the  spirit  of  their  elders.  After  all,  are  the 
people  of  the  town,  taking  the  average  merchant 
and  shop-keeper,  so  much  superior  to  the  people 
of  the  country,  taking  the  average  fisherman  or 
farmer  as  a  type  ?  I  very  much  doubt  whether 
they  are  any  happier  because  they  spend  ten 
times  as  much  money.  Certainly  they  are  not 
half  so  healthy,  and  they  die  earlier.  It  did 
not  need  Matthew  Arnold  to  convince  many  of 
us  that  American  life  is  often  sadly  uninterest- 
ing, commonplace,  even  inane.  We  all  know 
how  sadly  vapid  is  the  talk  of  ninety-nine 


24  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

people  out  of  a  hundred  we  meet.  Most  of  us 
can  count  upon  our  fingers  the  men  and  women 
we  know  whose  talk  is  worth  listening  to.  I 
am  not  sure  that  the  effect  of  city  life  as  seen 
in  our  large  cities  is  any  thing  to  be  proud  of. 
In  the  old  days,  before  railroads  and  post-offices 
and  cheap  newspapers  and  books,  country  life 
meant  intellectual  isolation.  To-day  it  means 
nothing  of  the  kind ;  no  matter  how  far  you  are 
from  the  centres  of  civilization  the  mails  bring 
you  all  the  thought  of  the  great  world  worth 
recording.  The  conditions  have  changed. 

People  talk  of  the  inspiration  of  the  crowd, 
the  electrical  influence  of  great  numbers,  the 
brilliant  minds  reflecting  light  upon  the  dull 
ones.  I  confess  that  I  can  see  but  little  of  this 
in  our  American  cities.  The  danger  is  rather 
that  the  individual  will  be  colored  by  his  sur- 
roundings and  reduced  to  that  level.  Our  great 
public  schools  tend  to  turn  out  boys  and  girls 
all  knowing  the  same  things,  all  thinking  the 
same  way,  all  intellectually  fashioned  upon  the 
same  model,  and  that  a  poor  one.  Unless 
I  am  able  to  provide  for  my  boys  and  girls 
teachers  of  exceptional  merit,  I  should  rather 
trust  to  home  influence  and  the  district  school 


LIVING  ON  NEXT  TO  NOTHING  A   YEAR.  2$ 

of  the  country  village  than  to  the  great  public 
schools  of  large  cities,  always  with  the  idea  that 
the  boy  would  find  it  possible  to  work  his  way 
through  college  some  day,  and  that  the  girl 
would  not  grow  up  without  some  idea  of 'litera- 
ture and  music.  The  question  with  me  is  not 
whether  the  influence  of  the  crowds  of  cities  is 
for  good,  but  whether  it  is  not  for  evil. 


THE  SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD. 

DERHAPS  I  cannot  do  better,  in  order  to  tell 
the  sort  of  life  that  I  have  found  possible 


and  profitable  upon  an  income  of  less  than 
a  month,  than  to  take  from  my  diary  the 
following  record  of  a  week.  I  will  say  nothing 
of  Sunday,  as  that  day  is  always  given  up  by  us 
to  church-going,  walking,  and  sometimes,  in  hot 
weather,  to  sailing  and  bathing,  in  the  morning 
at  least. 

Monday,  Sept. — Pouring  in  torrents  ;  took  up 
a  bushel  of  beets  and  a  bushel  of  carrots  and  put 
by  for  winter  use  in  the  cellar.  After  breakfast 
went  off  in  a  drizzle  of  rain  sailing  with  the 
children  to  Duck  Island  for  a  load  of  salt  grass 
wherewith  to  cover  the  strawberry  bed  next 
December.  Got  enough  in  an  hour,  the  chil- 
dren helping,  to  load  up.  The  rain  in  the 
meantime  cleared  off,  the  wind  coming  from 
the  southwest  and  cooler ;  wheeled  up  the 
meadow  grass  from  the  boat  and  stacked  it  up 
near  the  strawberry  bed  ready  for  use  by  the 
26 


THE   SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  2/ 

time  the  ground  is  well  frozen.  Wrote  after 
luncheon  from  one  to  three  o'clock.  Started 
out  at  three  for  the  woods  with  the  children, 
and  went  two  miles  to  chop  down  some  pines 
that  we  can  have  for  almost  nothing  for  fire- 
wood. Cut  up  enough  to  make  a  quarter  of  a 
cord,  I  should  think,  and  got  back  at  sundown 
with  enough  twigs  to  make  kindling  for  a  week. 
When  my  neighbor  B.  gets  ready  next  month 
to  haul  our  wood-pile  home,  he  will  find  that 
my  axe  has  been  kept  sharp.  The  day  ended 
with  a  splendid  break  of  sunshine,  the  pink  of 
the  whole  west  presaging  the  coming  autumn. 
Every  blow  of  the  axe  seems  to  bring  up  pic- 
tures of  what  glorious  good  fires  these  pine 
logs  will  make  for  us.  On  the  way  home 
stopped  for  the  mail,  a  bundle  of  books 
coming  from  the  library.  After  dinner  read 
some  sketches  of  Henry  James,  published  in 
the  old  Galaxy  years  ago,  which  E.  sends  us  as 
worth  reading.  They  have  all  James*  present 
subtlety  with  the  picturesque  quality  that  he 
appears  to  have  lost  in  some  degree,  judging 
from  his  recent  French  studies. 

Tuesday. — Hard  work  in  the  garden  before 
breakfast  and  until  ten  o'clock.  Hoed  up  all 
the  bean  plants  and  planted  late  carrots ;  doubt- 
ful if  they  come  to  much  so  late,  but  worth 
trying.  Had  to  branch  up  some  of  the  tomato 
vines,  which  were  too  heavy  for  the  twigs  al- 
ready under  them.  Yesterday's  rain  seems  to 


28  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

have  given  a  new  start  to  the  whole  garden,  which 
last  week  seemed  to  be  taking  a  rest  after  the 
summer's  exertions,  and  ready  to  give  up  the 
battle  for  the  year.  The  late  beans,  carrots, 
turnips,  lettuce,  tomatoes  looking  superb. 
Wrote  from  ten  to  twelve,  intending  to  go 
oystering  in  the  afternoon  with  the  children. 
After  lunch  it  was  blowing  great  guns  on  the 
bay,  the  white  caps  in  every  direction.  Only 
half-a-dozen  boats  out,  and  those  triple-reefed  ; 
too  rough  for  pleasant  oystering,  and  so  started 
off  again  for  the  woods,  baby  and  all,  the  baby 
going  along  in  his  carriage.  Went  in  for  tree- 
cutting  as  if  life  depended  upon  it.  Took  a  new 
road  across  country  coming  back  and  got  lost, 
but  found  a  deserted  orchard  and  filled  the 
baby-carriage  with  enough  stolen  apples  to  last 
a  week.  No  letters  in  the  mail,  no  books, 
nothing.  Finished  up  the  Galaxy  sketches  of 
James,  and  voted  them  well  worth  the  time 
spent  upon  them. 

Wednesday. — A  touch  of  frost  in  the  air,  al- 
though September  is  not  half  over.  After 
breakfast,  filled  up  some  gaps  in  my  new  straw- 
berry bed  with  runners  from  the  old  one.  Dug 
four  post-holes  in  order  to  get  good  stout  sup- 
port for  the  wire  fence  which  must  go  around 
the  whole  garden  next  year.  Went  oystering 
after  lunch  with  A.  and  L.  and  the  children. 
Delightful  on  the  water,  although  towards  the 
ocean  every  thing  seems  to  be  as  deserted  by 


THE   SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  29 

the  crowd  as  if  it  were  midwinter.  Brought 
back  a  bushel  of  oysters  in  defiance  of  the  law, 
which  is  not  yet  up.  Opened  some  of  them 
before  dinner,  and  packed  the  rest  in  the  cellar. 
For  dinner  we  had  the  sixth  unfortunate  chicken 
of  our  devoted  little  band.  Cold  enough  for  a 
fire  ;  we  had  the  first  blaze  of  the  autumn,  the 
great  bunches  of  ferns  and  moss-covered  twigs 
which  have  filled  the  fireplace  all  summer 
going  first  with  a  crackling  roar.  Read  the 
last  of  Kennan's  articles  on  Siberia  from  the 
Century  and  some  of  the  "  open  letters." 
Pretty  well  tired  out ;  between  the  effects  of 
the  fire  and  the  oystering  began  to  nod  over 
our  books  by  the  time  the  clock  struck  ten. 

Thursday. — Went  over  more  than  half  of  the 
garden  between  breakfast  and  ten  o'clock, 
giving  the  last  hoeing  that  will  be  needed  this 
year.  Notwithstanding  Monday's  rain,  the 
weeds  already  show  a  disposition  to  stay  in  the 
ground,  and  it  is  evident  that  all  vegetation 
has  lost  heart.  Got  through  the  task  at  ten 
o'clock,  and  as  weeding  is  what  I  like  least 
about  gardening,  there  is  much  comfort  in  find- 
ing that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  getting  ahead  of 
the  weeds  if  you  keep  up  the  battle  persistently 
enough.  Wrote  from  ten  to  lunch  time.  After 
luncheon  went  with  A.  and  the  children  over 
to  the  beach,  sailing  our  three  miles  across  the 
bay  with  a  free  wind  in  less  than  half  an  hour. 
One  would  scarcely  believe  that  in  three  weeks 


30  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

so  great  a  change  had  taken  place.  Three 
weeks  ago  the  beach  was  alive  with  people,  the 
bay  was  full  of  boats,  sailing  back  and  forth, 
the  little  bathing  station  on  the  beach  had 
plenty  to  do,  there  were  dozens  of  people  in 
the  surf  and  scores  walking  along  the  sands. 
To-day  we  were  one  of  half-a-dozen  sails  to  be 
found  as  far  as  the  eye  could  reach.  On  the 
beach  there  was  complete  silence,  except  for 
the  boom  of  the  surf  and  the  pipe  of  an  occa- 
sional quail.  Tradition  says  that  the  quail 
along  this  narrow  line  of  sand,  which  stretches 
from  Fire  Island  to  Quogue,  came  ashore  from 
an  English  vessel  wrecked  off  Moriches  many 
years  ago.  They  were  intended  for  some  rich 
man's  estate,  but  escaped  here  and  have  done 
well.  The  season  is  so  nearly  through,  so  far 
as  bathing  is  concerned,  that  we  gathered  up 
our  bathing  suits,  camp-chairs,  and  beach- 
shades,  and  put  them  aboard  the  Nelly  for 
home.  The  sail  home  against  a  brisk,  steady 
northwest  breeze  was  one  of  the  most  delightful 
we  have  had  this  summer,  the  nose  of  the  boat 
plowing  the  water  half  the  way  back,  and  the 
main-sheet  wet  half  up  the  mast.  As  is  so 
often  the  way  on  the  Great  South  Bay,  the 
wind  died  out  at  sundown,  and  as  we  carried 
our  beach  traps  up  to  the  house  the  whole  west 
was  aflame,  the  air  cooler,  but  the  wind  gone. 
The  last  of  the  hotel  and  boarding-house  people 
seem  to  be  going,  so  that  we  shall  soon  have 


THE  SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  31 

the  bay  to  ourselves.  One  storm  in  early  Sep- 
tember seems  to  scare  the  whole  crowd  off. 
Had  another  fire  after  dinner,  and  read  the  last 
instalment  of  Howells'  novel  in  Harper  s. 

Friday. — Opened  a  lot  of  oysters  before 
breakfast  and  dug  the  other  post-holes  before 
lunch,  making  a  long  morning's  work  as  I  have 
no  digging  apparatus  fit  for  the  job.  Let  the 
chickens  out  for  a  tramp  over  the  garden,  keep- 
ing the  children  to  see  that  they  did  not  get  into 
the  tomato  vines.  The  children  picked  all  the 
tomatoes  for  the  yearly  canning — more  than 
three  bushels.  Wrote  after  lunch  until  three 
o'clock,  and  started  out  with  the  whole  family 
to  go  down  along  the  shore  about  a  mile  from 
here  where  there  are  some  branches  of  dead 
pine  overgrown  with  silvery  moss  ;  took  a  saw 
along  and  brought  home  a  lot  with  which  to 
decorate  ;  picked  up  some  wonderful  grasses  of 
a  kind  unknown  to  me,  which  we  found  grow- 
ing to  a  height  of  seven  feet  in  a  sort  of  half 
swamp,  half  bog.  Growing  dark  early,  but 
not  cold  enough  for  our  fire.  Looked  up  and 
read  some  chapters  on  wild  grasses,  and  wrote 
some  private  letters.  S.  gave  us  some  remi- 
niscences of  "  Die  Meistersinger,"  on  the  piano, 
and  A.  sang  some  Schubert  songs. 

The  talk  this  evening  ran  upon  the  future  of 
music  in  New  York,  and  while  in  J.  we  had  a 
devoted  believer  in  the  grandeur  and  import- 
ance of  our  musical  future,  S.  was  entirely 


32  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

sceptical,  and  believed  that  whether  or  'not 
the  Wagner  wave  had  a  more  solid  foundation 
than  passing  fashion,  the  real  love  of  music  was 
not  deep  enough  to  encourage  the  hope  of  a  per- 
manent opera,  such  as  exists  in  Vienna,  Berlin, 
Munich,  and  half-a-dozen  other  German  cities. 
The  idea  that  the  love  of  Wagner's  music  is,  so 
to  speak,  fictitious,  and  the  professions  of  the 
Wagner  enthusiasts  merely  due  to  the  extrane- 
ous influence  of  the  moment,  I  hear  a  good  deal 
about,  but  can  never  take  quite  seriously.  One 
of  my  friends  insists  that  the  more  violent  the 
craze  for  Wagnerism,  the  sooner  it  will  be  over, 
and  that  the  very  persons  who  are  now  decry- 
ing every  thing  but  Wagner,  will  soon  be  hailing 
the  advent  of  some  new  light,  more  abstruse 
and  bizarre  than  the  Bayreuth  master — perhaps 
Ching-Chang,  with  his  orchestra  playing  in  half- 
a-dozen  keys  at  once.  I  know  that  this  is  a 
common  impression  among  unmusical  people. 
But  I  see  around  me  so  many  persons  who  are 
perfectly  sincere  in  the  pre-eminent  position 
which  they  gave  to  this  music  of  the  future, 
so-called  for  many  years,  and  now  so  much  the 
music  of  the  present,  that  I  have  long  ceased  to 
have  any  misgivings  about  the  matter.  The 
time  was  when,  with  the  neophyte's  ardor,  I  was 
ready  to  ascribe  all  opposition  to  Wagner 
either  to  ignorance  or  dishonesty.  Since  then, 
I  have  met  persons  who  know  something  of 
music,  and  yet  prefer  Mozart,  Beethoven,  or 


THE  SORT  OF  L/FE  WE  LEAD.  33 

Brahms,  to  Wagner,  and  of  their  honesty  I  am 
as  well  convinced  as  of  their  knowledge  and 
good-taste.  Nevertheless  such  persons  are 
very  few,  and  whereas  among  musically  edu- 
cated men  and  women  the  preference  for  Wag- 
ner's music  above  all  other  is  overwhelming, 
the  chief  opposition  is  really  due  to  simple 
ignorance.  As  for  argument  upon  the  question, 
it  is  very  much  like  arguing  as  to  religion  ;  we 
have  no  scientific  data  to  start  from.  I  may 
insist  that  the  "  Meistersinger "  prize-song  is 
better  music  than  "  Silver  Threads  among  the 
Gold,"  but  beyond  quoting  expert  opinions  in 
favor  of  my  opinion,  what  is  there  to  say? 
Musical  judgment  must  be  more  or  less  empiri- 
cal. In  painting,  in  sculpture,  in  literature,  there 
are  fixed  standards;  in  music,  none.  The  music 
which  to-day  the  cultivated  world  considers 
admirable  in  every  respect  was  condemned 
a  generation  ago  by  experts  as  meaningless, 
chaotic,  and  unworthy  of  serious  attention.  The 
future  of  music  in  New  York  interests  us  here 
in  the  wilderness  to  the  extent  that  it  is  the 
chief  magnet  in  drawing  us  to  the  city  when 
the  snow  begins  to  fly  in  earnest.  Were  it  not 
for  the  German  performances  at  our  opera- 
house,  I  doubt  whether  we  should  consider  it 
worth  our  while  to  pack  our  trunks  and  suffer 
the  ills  of  a  city  boarding-house  for  even  a 
fortnight. 

For  my  own  part,  I  look  forward  to  the  day 


34  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

when  the  phonograph  will  come  to  our  rescue. 
Although  this  little  instrument  is  yet  in  its 
infancy,  I  do  not  see  how  any  one  who  has 
examined  it  at  all  can  doubt  its  future  import- 
ance. It  may  be  a  year  from  now,  or  ten  years 
from  now,  but  that  some  day  the  phonograph 
will  be  the  reader,  singer,  and  player  for  the 
family,  is  to  me  beyond  doubt.  I  have  heard 
results  so  marvellous  from  the  instrument  even 
in  its  present  crude  shape,  that  when  scores  of 
inventors  have  had  time  to  work  at  it,  its  per- 
formances will  be  nothing  short  of  miraculous. 
In  music,  especially,  it  seems  always  to  have 
excelled.  The  first  of  the  Edison  phonographs, 
which  were  admittedly  toys,  so  far  as  talking  is 
concerned,  reproduced  singing,  violin  playing, 
whistling,  with  extraordinary  fidelity.  The 
later  instrument  of  to-day  gives  out  a  piano 
piece  so  that  not  only  all  the  notes  are  heard  as 
if  the  piano  was  in  the  next  room,  but  even  the 
overtones  and  the  after-vibrations  of  the 
strings  are  distinct.  Inasmuch  as  it  will  cost 
scarcely  any  thing  to  make  duplicates  of  the 
wax  cylinders  bearing  upon  them  music,  it  will 
pay  to  take  great  pains  and  go  to  heavy  ex- 
pense in  order  to  obtain  an  original  cylinder 
which  gives  results  as  perfect  as  possible. 
Rubinstein  may  well  devote  himself  to  playing 
into  huge  sounding  funnels,  if  he  knows  that 
duplicates  of  the  little  wax  cylinder  at  the 
other  end  of  the  funnel  are  to  be  distributed 


THE   SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  35 

all  over  the  civilized  world,  and  that  millions  of 
people  now,  and  perhaps  a  thousand  years 
from  now,  will  listen  to  an  echo  of  his  work. 
This  feature  of  the  certain  and  almost  costless 
reproduction  of  these  cylinders  will  cause  the 
search  for  a  sound  magnifier  to  begin  again  in 
earnest.  Some  years  ago  Mr.  Edison  exhibited 
an  apparatus  whereby  the  noise  made  by  a  fly 
walking  across  a  sheet  of  paper  was  made  to 
sound  like  the  tramp  of  a  horse  across  the 
stable  floor.  Is  it  too  great  a  stretch  of  the 
imagination  to  predict  that  some  similar  means 
of  magnifying  sound  will  be  applied  to  the 
echo  of  the  phonograph  ? 

Some  day  we  may  have  our  operas  and  our 
concerts  at  home. 

Saturday. — Delightfully  cold  again  ;  and  off 
to  the  woods  with  the  children  right  after 
breakfast,  there  being  no  school.  Worked 
hard  at  the  pines,  while  the  young  ones  picked 
up  twigs  and  chopped  for  the  kindling  pile ; 
took  our  luncheon  along,  and  ate  it  with  the 
music  of  the  countless  quail  calling  for  Bob 
White  from  all  directions  ;  the  breeze  was  from 
inland,  but  full  of  life,  and  laden  with  incense 
from  the  miles  of  pine  between  here  and  Long 
Island  Sound.  On  our  way  home  met  S.,  with 
a  fine  deer,  which,  to  my  amazement,  he  told 
us  had  been  shot  not  ten  miles  from  us. 
The  idea  of  wild  deer  on  Long  Island  would 
surprise  a  good  many  New  Yorkers.  At  the 


36  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

store,  where  we  stopped  for  the  mail,  there  are 
reports  of  ducks  in  plenty.  A  man  with  a  good 
gun  ought  not  to  starve  around  here.  Two  of 
the  children  fell  asleep  at  dinner,  and,  after  a 
little  music,  we  decided  to  go  to  bed,  omitting 
the  usual  literary  exercises,  and  rejecting  A.'s 
proposition  to  read  a  chapter  on  mental  lazi- 
ness. The  dinner  enlivened  by  a  heated  dis- 
cussion over  the  "  good  gray  poet,"  now 
reported  to  be  very  low  in  health. 

I  do  not  know  whether  this  little  extract 
from  my  diary  gives  a  picture  which  impresses 
the  casual  reader  as  pleasant  or  the  reverse. 
Not  once  during  such  a  week  had  I  to  discuss 
unpleasant  matters,  or  distressingly  common- 
place matters  with  unpleasant  or  commonplace 
people.  I  had  earned  enough  money  by  writ- 
ing to  more  than  pay  the  modest  cost  of  this 
life.  Every  thing  but  the  groceries  and  the 
little  meat  required  we  had  supplied  ourselves 
— the  vegetables,  the  eggs,  the  chickens,  the 
oysters,  the  crabs,  the  honey,  and  the  apples — 
the  last  stolen.  No  doubt  chopping  down 
wood,  although  an  occupation  much  affected 
by  a  famous  Englishman — perhaps  the  most 
famous  Englishman — of  this  age,  might  appeal 
to  some  of  us,  owing  to  the  idiotic  Anglomania 


THE  SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  3/ 

of  the  day,  but  it  is  not  the  sort  of  sport  that 
the  average  city  man  yearns  for.  The  utili- 
tarian part  of  it — a  very  important  part  of  it  to 
me,  and  in  fact  I  view  all  my  sports  from  a 
utilitarian  point  of  view — certainly  would  not 
impress  the  city  man  who  rushes  out  of  town 
for  two  weeks  of  the  year  in  order  to  get  what 
he  calls  recreation.  Wood  means  good  fires  to 
us,  and  good  big  fires  are  essential  in  our  coun- 
try home.  I  should  say  that  we  burn  a  cord  of 
wood  in  a  fortnight,  although  the  big  fire  is  not 
going  all  day ;  in  cold  weather  a  small  self- 
feeding  stove  hidden  by  a  screen  keeps  the 
living-room  comfortable.  I  suppose  I  might 
say  the  same  thing  in  regard  to  oystering. 
The  poet's  friend  who  found  nothing  in  the 
primrose  would  certainly  not  enjoy  oystering. 
For  my  part,  oystering  is  one  of  the  pleasures 
of  the  year.  It  is  one  of  my  sports  that  I  rank 
highest.  I  sail  my  own  boat  over  to  a  part  of 
the  bay  which  abounds  in  oysters,  and,  allow- 
ing the  sheet  to  run  out,  I  can  "  tong  away"  on 
deck,  thro  wing  the  oysters  in  their  queer  growths 
to  the  children,  who  throw  away  the  shell  and 
refuse,  cutting  the  oysters  apart,  as  they  grow 
mainly  in  bunches,  and  piling  them  up  in  the 


38  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

basket,  which  we  carry  home.  Take  an  after- 
noon in  October,  with  a  good  breeze  blowing, 
not  enough  to  make  the  water  very  rough,  and, 
with  my  young  ones  as  company,  I  can  get  as 
much  real  pleasure  and  certainly  as  much 
healthy  exercise  from  oystering  in  the  Great 
South  Bay  as  from  any  sport  I  know  of.  Then 
there  is  the  money  value  of  the  oysters  to  be 
thought  of.  If  I  could  not  get  a  bushel  of 
oysters  in  an  afternoon,  I  should  have  to  buy 
meat. 

I  have  tried  by  practical  lessons  to  convince 
several  city  friends  that  there  is  a  joy  about 
scraping  the  bottom  of  the  sea  for  oysters 
beyond  any  thing  that  they  could  have  ima- 
gined. I  induced  a  critical  friend  of  mine  to 
take  off  his  coat  one  fine  afternoon  and  work 
the  "  tongs."  The  water  was  pretty  rough,  and 
he  had  to  jump  about  a  good  deal  on  deck  in 
order  to  keep  his  footing.  I  should  say  that  in 
the  half-hour  he  played  at  oystering,  he  brought 
up  thirty  or  forty  oysters.  At  the  end  of  that 
time  he  said  that  he  would  rather  write  a  two- 
column  article  than  rake  a  bushel  of  oysters, 
and  he  smoked  cigars  and  threw  shells  into  the 
water  for  the  rest  of  the  afternoon.  When 


THE   SORT  OF  LIFE  WE  LEAD.  39 

I  met  him  a  month  later  in  the  dusty,  miserable 
city  of  New  York,  he  said  that  he  attributed 
queer  pains  in  his  back  to  that  oystering  expe- 
rience. Some  men  are  blind  to  the  opportuni- 
ties of  this  life. 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS  WILL  SAY. 

"  TT  is  fortunate,"  said  one  of  my  friends  to 
whom  I  described  my  way  of  living,  "  that 
all  people  do  not  think  as  you  do  or  the  world 
would  stand  still.  If  we  were  all  to  shun  the 
city,  to  go  off  hunting  or  oystering  every  day, 
contenting  ourselves  with  the  unambitious  life 
you  lead,  there  would  be  certain  deterioration. 
Where  would  be  our  inventors,  our  great 
scholars,  who  devote  their  lives  to  incessant 
work,  and  our  merchant  princes  who  never 
miss  a  day  in  their  counting-rooms,  the  men 
who  plan  vast  operations  and  make  the  country 
rich  and  prosperous?"  Of  course  this  is  the 
common  argument  against  any  such  scheme  as 
mine,  and  if  a  man  enjoys  the  management  of 
vast  commercial  operations,  if  he  likes  to  tele- 
graph here  and  there  to  buy  tons  of  lard  at 
a  low  price  and  telegraph  elsewhere  to  sell  them 
at  a  high  price,  I  am  only  too  delighted  to 
have  him  do  so  and  perhaps  thereby  enable  me 
40 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS    WILL   SAY.  41 

to  buy  my  lard  a  little  cheaper  at  our  country 
store.  By  sitting  in  his  counting-room  three 
hundred  days  out  of  the  year  and  eight  hours 
of  the  day  he  gives  me  my  lard  a  little  cheaper, 
and  he  finds  pleasure  in  it.  The  operation  gives 
him  a  big  stone  house  to  live  in,  a  carriage  which 
his  wife  rides  in,  for  he  never  finds  any  time,  an 
opera  box  which  his  wife  and  daughters  may 
enjoy,  for  he  has  no  knowledge  of  music  ;  he 
has  never  had  any  time  to  learn  any  thing  be- 
yond the  quotations  of  lard  in  different  parts  of 
the  world.  If  these  noble  men  devoted  to  lard 
and  other  commercial  operations, — if  they  like 
it,  I  am  only  too  delighted.  If  I  thought  they 
were  breaking  themselves  down,  losing  year 
after  year  of  oystering  and  wood-cutting  in 
order  to  give  me  my  lard  one  eighth  of  a  cent  a 
pound  cheaper  than  I  should  otherwise  have  it, 
it  would  cast  a  shadow  over  my  sports ;  I  should 
hate  to  think  that  I'was  reaping  while  they  were 
laboring. 

Seriously,  does  any  one  contend  that  the  life 
of  to-day  is  any  happier,  any  more  rational,  any 
more  healthy,  than  the  life  in  the  American  colo- 
nies one  hundred  years  ago  ?  So  far  as  material 
prosperity  goes,  it  seems  that  there  was  far  less 


42  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

poverty  then  than  now  in  the  necessaries  of 
life  ;  the  farm-houses  were  filled  to  overflowing 
with  good  things  to  eat  and  drink.  There  were 
few  books,  and  if  some  inventors  and  workers 
had  not  given  up  country  life  long  enough  to 
invent  power-presses  we  might  not  have  news- 
papers and  books  so  cheap  as  they  are  to-day. 
But  I  doubt  if  any  one  thinks  of  colonial  life  in 
this  country  as  less  worth  living  than  our  life  of 
to-day.  Certainly  in  New  York  City  there  was 
not,  in  proportion  to  the  population,  one  quar- 
ter of  the  poverty,  the  misery,  the  vice  that  we 
know  to-day.  There  was  not  that  fierce  strug- 
gle for  existence  which  blights  the  lives  of  so 
many  hundreds  of  thousands  of  our  fellow- 
creatures. 

If  the  world  persisted  in  playing  as  I  do, 
although  few  people  regard  wood-cutting  and 
grubbing  in  a  garden  as  play,  should  we  not 
have  had  any  great  inventions,  should  we  not 
have  had  any  steam-engines,  or  the  power-press, 
or  the  telephone  ?  This  would  imply  that  the 
man  who  devoted  a  large  part  of  his  life  to 
such  sports  as  I  do,  wholly  unfits  himself  for 
other  kinds  of  work — which  I  deny.  My  own 
work  which  brings  me  money  happens  to  be 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS   WILL   SAY.  43 

writing  articles  for  which  misguided  publishers 
of  newspapers  pay  me.  I  devote  a  certain  num- 
ber of  hours  in  the  week  to  writing,  nor  in  my 
humble  opinion  is  it  the  easy  writing  which  is 
supposed  to  make  such  hard  reading.  There  is 
no  reason  why  other  people  who  choose  to  cut 
loose  from  city  life,  having  found  its  cost  greater 
than  its  worth,  should  not  employ  a  certain 
number  of  hours  every  day  at  the  kind  of  work 
for  which  they  happen  to  have  a  particular 
bent.  I  see  already  that  my  eldest  boy  will 
probably  turn  his  attention  to  machinery,  and 
perhaps  become  an  electrician.  It  is  not  abso- 
lutely necessary  that  he  should  remain  in  the 
machine-shop  all  his  life  in  order  to  contribute 
something  to  the  world's  stock  of  machinery. 
Some  of  the  greatest  inventions  and  most  valu- 
able suggestions  have  been  made  by  men  far 
away  from  the  great  centres  of  life. 

Again,  if  in  our  bustling  New  York  we  saw 
that  most  men  really  do  produce  valuable  worl^ 
essential  to  the  happiness  of  mankind,  there 
might  be  some  misgiving  as  to  the  policy  of 
isolating  one's  self  from  the  crowd  and  endeav- 
oring to  get  as  much  enjoyment  upon  com- 
paratively nothing  a  year  as  the  millionaire. 


44  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

may  get.  Who  does  not  know  that  hundreds 
of  the  rich  men  of  New  York  City  owe  their 
wealth  to  gambling,  pure  and  simple,  the  rest 
of  the  country  furnishing  the  victims  and  the 
money  ?  Statistics  show,  for  instance,  that  of  all 
the  buying  and  selling  done  upon  the  New 
York  Produce  Exchange,  ninety-five  per  cent, 
represents  gambling;  five  per  cent,  represents 
actual  buying  and  selling  of  grain  and  produce. 
In  Wall  Street  it  is  still  worse.  These  dozens 
of  well-dressed  men,  the  men  who  own  the 
yachts  and  the  fast  horses  and  the  big  country 
places,  do  no  useful  work,  produce  nothing,  and 
if  their  business  could  be  wiped  out  of  existence 
to-morrow  the  world  would  be  no  poorer. 
Under  cover  of  the  little  legitimate  trading  or 
business  which  has  to  be  done  in  stocks  or 
bonds,  this  army  of  gamblers  grow  rich  upon 
the  passion  of  human  nature  to  get  something 
without  work.  Every  little  town  in  the  country 
sends  its  money  to  the  great  city  to  be  matched 
against  the  money  from  somewhere  else.  These 
precious  brokers  are  the  bankers  in  the  game. 
To  pretend  that  the  business  is  a  whit  better 
than  gambling  with  dice  and  cards  has  always 
seemed  to  me  hypocrisy  ;  the  man  who  deals 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS    WILL   SAY.  45 

in  lard,  honestly  buying  lard  and  selling  lard, 
and  not  simply  betting  upon  the  future  price  of 
lard,  may  be  doing  useful  work  in  getting  lard 
where  it  is  plenty  and  carrying  it  to  places 
where  it  is  scarce,  and  so  throughout  the  whole 
range  of  legitimate  mercantile  life.  The  man 
who  keeps  a  retail  shop  of  any  kind  is  of  actual 
service  to  the  community  But  the  typical 
broker — what  does  he  produce  in  the  course  of 
a  year  to  pay  for  the  large  sums  of  money  he 
receives?  This  is  an  old  topic,  and  I  have 
nothing  new  to  say  about  it.  But  when  people 
point  to  me  as  an  idler,  wasting  my  time  and 
neglecting  my  opportunities,  and  at  the  same 
time  point  to  my  neighbor,  the  successful 
broker,  as  an  example,  I  must  decline  to  be 
impressed.  At  least,  I  give  something  in  return 
for  what  the  world  gives  me.  The  articles  I 
write  may  be  poor  enough,  but  some  people 
read  them,  and  live  to  want  to  read  more,  or 
publishers  would  not  buy  them. 

I  have  a  dear  friend  who  is  a  cotton-broker. 
He  admits  candidly  that  his  business  is  gam- 
bling, pure  and  simple,  but  he  contends  that  if 
people  want  to  gamble,  and  want  to  pay  him  a 
comfortable  income  for  registering  their  bets, 


46  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

there  is  no  reason  why  he  should  refuse.  If 
people  do  want  to  buy  actual  cotton,  he  will  buy 
cotton  for  them,  although  he  would  scarcely 
know  a  bale  of  cotton  if  he  saw  one.  But  his 
customers  want  to  gamble,  and  pay  him  well 
for  helping  them  to  do  so.  He  has  no  taste  or 
love  for  chopping  wood  or  raking  oysters,  but 
enjoys  sitting  at  a  big  desk  for  several  hours  a 
day  receiving  checks  from  customers,  paying 
out  the  losses  and  the  gains,  and  dropping  into 
Delmonico's  in  the  middle  of  the  day  for 
luncheon  and  a  quiet  talk  about  the  best  card  in 
the  game  to  put  your  money  on.  When  a  man's 
conscience  can  allow  him  to  do  that  sort  of 
business  day  after  day,  I  do  not  know  whether 
to  be  glad  or  sorry  for  him.  Another  friend  of 
mine,  also  a  broker,  to  whom  I  said  one  even- 
ing at  dinner,  "  You  have  produced  nothing, 
earned  nothing  of  value  to-day,"  replied  to  me  : 
"  Yes,  I  have.  Here  is  a  check  for  $200,  the 
profits  of  a  turn  in  wheat;  it  was  done  in  half 
an  hour.  I  bought  low,  and  I  sold  high." 
"  And,"  I  asked,  "  do  you  not  pity  the  man  who 
lost  that  $200,  for  you  gave  no  equivalent 
in  work  for  it."  This  seemed  to  be  so  extra- 
ordinary a  view  of  the  matter  that  every  one 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS    WILL  SAY.  tf 

laughed ;  no  one  seemed  to  have  the  least 
sympathy  for  the  unfortunate  loser  in  the  game. 
Do  not  these  things  show  that  this  speculation 
disease  is  blunting  the  moral  sense  of  the  com- 
munity ?  My  friend  of  whom  I  spoke  first  is  a 
man  to  whose  friendship  I  owe  much,  and  for 
whose  character  I  have  the  highest  esteem. 
He  is  kindliness  itself.  And  yet  point  out  to 
him,  or  try  to  point  out  to  him,  that  the  life  of 
a  broker,  although  admittedly  gambling,  pure 
and  simple,  is  a  vicious  one,  and  he  will  laugh 
good-naturedly,  and  go  on  with  profound  con- 
tent upon  his  "  vicious  "  course. 

To  state  briefly  my  view,  to  sum  up  the  gist 
of  what  I  have  put  into  the  foregoing  pages, 
what  I  advance  and  believe  is  that  the  hard- 
working city  man  does  not  get  his  rights  out 
of  life.  It  may  be  that  ignorance  is  bliss.  He 
may  be  swept  so  far  in  the  wrong  direction  as 
to  lose  all  proper  estimate  of  the  good  things 
of  this  life  ;  his  ideas  of  relative  values  may  be 
distorted.  He  may  consider  that  fine  clothes 
and  a  big  house  make  up  for  lack  of  real  sport ; 
he  may  find  more  pleasure  in  counting  bills 
than  in  sailing  or  walking.  A  misguided  sense 
of  duty  may  keep  him  all  his  life  half-starved 


48  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

for  rational  sport ;  he  may,  like  the  unfortunate 
person  of  whom  I  spoke  at  the  beginning  of 
this  book,  "  die  in  harness  "  as  a  typical  Amer- 
ican. I  believe  that  there  is  an  escape  from 
the  anxiety,  the  toil,  the  wear  of  business  in 
rational  pursuits  offered  to  us  by  the  country, 
and  that  we  can  abandon  the  town  without 
sacrificing  culture,  education,  and  intellectual 
life.  I  am  free  to  admit  that  I  should  not 
advise  any  man  accustomed  to  living  in  the 
tittle-tattle  of  the  town,  accustomed  to  "  pad- 
dling in  social  slush,"  as  Thoreau  puts  it,  to  go 
to  the  country  carrying  nothing  with  him.  If 
a  man  has  no  resources  of  his  own,  if  he  finds 
no  pleasure  in  books  and  literature,  I  should 
say  beware  of  the  country.  Any  such  scheme 
as  I  have  outlined  would  fail ;  it  may  be  that 
very  few  men  are  so  fond  of  out-door  life  that 
they  would  consider  the  loss  of  New  York's 
advantages  as  of  small  account  in  comparison 
with  the  joys  of  wood-chopping  and  oyster- 
dredging.  In  writing  these  pages  I  have  had 
no  intention  of  tempting  away  the  clerk  from 
his  yardstick  or  his  ledger,  or  the  broker  from 
his  office.  I  have  simply  had  my  say,  knowing 
that  I  am  in  an  insignificant  minority.  I  think  I 


WHAT  MY  CRITICS    WILL   SAY.  49 

have  shown  that  bankruptcy  need  not  result 
from  such  a  course,  providing  there  is  a  small 
income,  so  small  that  most  men  who  reach 
middle  age  have  it  at  their  disposal.  And  in 
such  a  case  there  is  the  possibility  of  getting 
also  out  of  the  city  some  of  its  advantages, 
for  there  are  several  months  in  the  depth  of 
winter  when  there  is  nothing  to  be  done,  either 
in  the  way  of  sport  or  work,  in  the  country.  I 
have  gone  so  far  as  to  say  that  even  if  country 
life  meant  entire  isolation  from  the  city,  and 
dependence  for  a  living  on  the  money  which 
may  be  made  in  the  country,  even  then  there  is 
much  to  be  said  in  favor  of  such  a  move. 
Nevertheless,  money  is  not  plenty  in  the  coun- 
try, and  if  a  man  and  his  family  are  not  pre- 
pared to  live  in  the  simplest  possible  fashion, 
and  to  undergo  some  little  privations,  better  by 
far  stick  to  the  ills  that  they  know  of. 


HOME. 

'T'HREE  years  ago  I  made  such  changes  in 
my  business  engagements  as  to  begin  my 
series  of  experiments.  I  wished  to  find  out 
how  far  a  small  income  of  less  than  $500  a 
year  would  carry  me  towards  independence  of 
the  city,  its  troubles  and  anxieties,  its  landlords 
and  their  bills.  The  question  was  whether  or 
not  I  could  so  supplement  such  an  income  by 
manual  out-door  labor,  as  to  keep  my  family  in 
comfort  the  year  round,  and  even  provide  fora 
few  weeks  of  city  life  in  the  dead  of  winter.  I 
resigned  my  city  position  and  took  a  small 
place  fifty  miles  from  New  York,  where  rent 
was  cheap,  the  soil  fairly  good  for  gardening^ 
and  within  gunshot  of  the  water.  I  counted 
upon  my  garden,  my  chickens,  and  my  boat  for 
a  good  deal,  and  I  was  not  disappointed.  As 
in  every  village,  the  vegetables,  eggs,  chickens, 
and  fish  were  dear  when  you  had  to  buy  them, 
partly  because  people  have  their  own  farm 
50 


HOME.  51 

supplies,  there  being  no  regular  business  done 
in  those  things,  and  partly  because  the  prices 
which  obtain  in  July  and  August  when  the 
summer  boarders  or  cottagers  come  to  be 
plucked,  regulate  the  prices  of  the  year.  In 
the  three  years  that  have  gone  by  since  then, 
the  difficulties  and  advantages  of  the  scheme 
have  defined  themselves.  I  can  say  that  in  my 
own  case,  at  least,  this  mode  of  life  is  infinitely 
preferable  for  a  poor  man  to  any  other  that  I 
have  discovered.  I  do  not  say  that  if  some 
great-uncle  in  India  should  leave  me  a  for- 
tune, I  would  not  make  some  changes  in  the 
direction  of  greater  sport  and  less  actual  labor, 
for  there  is  labor  in  the  raising  of  cabbages. 
And  yet  I  confess  that  my  pleasure  over  a 
fortune  from  the  skies  would  be  tempered  with 
the  knowledge  that  I  should  no  longer  take 
satisfaction  in  raising  cabbages  for  the  cabbages' 
sake.  I  might  go  on  working  my  home  acre, 
but  it  would  be  with  something  of  the  discon- 
tent with  which  I  used  to  work  a  bedroom 
gymnastic  apparatus  in  the  days  before  I 
deserted  the  city.  When  I  get  through  a  hard 
morning's  work  of  hoeing  or  planting,  there  is 
a  decided  satisfaction  in  the  thought  that  by 


52  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

this  gymnastic  exercise  in  the  sunlight  I  have 
been  cheating  the  world  out  of  a  living. 

But  I  cannot  advise  any  one  who  does  not 
love  hard  physical  exercise  to  attempt  any  such 
experiment.  It  requires  good  muscles  and 
system,  the  latter  especially,  as  I  shall  have 
occasion  to  insist  upon  more  than  once  in 
chapters  upon  my  garden,  my  bees,  and  my 
chickens.  Without  system  there  is  as  rapid  a 
deterioration  in  a  garden  as  in  a  business  enter- 
prise. Experience  has  taught  me  that  one 
hour's  writing  every  day,  or  an  hour's  garden- 
ing, accomplished  with  clock-like  regularity, 
gives  valuable  results,  where  spasmodic  work 
ends  in  comparatively  nothing.  The  same 
rules  which  obtain  in  business  life  hold  good  in 
my  country  work.  The  notion  that  a  whole 
day's  work  in  the  garden  once  a  week  is  as 
good  as  two  hours'  every  morning,  is  all 
wrong.  I  should  say  that  two  hours'  work  in 
the  garden  once  a  day,  from  the  middle  of 
April  to  the  end  of  August,  would  result  in 
twice  the  garden  produce  that  might  be  ex- 
pected from  the  same  number  of  hours'  work 
given  at  odd  moments  —  a  day  here  and  a  day 
there.  And  so  with  every  other  country  pur- 


HOME.  53 

suit.  So  great  is  my  preference  for  out-door 
work  and  sports  over  writing  book  reviews  and 
magazine  articles,  that  at  first  I  was  constantly 
tempted  to  throw  down  my  pen  and  take  to 
any  outdoor  work  in  sight,  quieting  my  con- 
science with  the  plea  that  I  would  make  up 
time  in  the  evening.  When  evening  came,  the 
distasteful  task  was  put  off  again  until  the  next 
morning.  Such  rules  as  are  necessary  to  get 
through  a  certain  amount  of  work  are  absolutely 
essential.  If  one  allots  the  hours  of  the  day  to 
certain  work  and  allows  no  interference  with 
the  arrangements  laid  down,  it  is  surprising 
what  can  be  accomplished  on  a  little  country 
place.  This  sounds  trite  enough,  and  yet  needs 
to  be  insisted  upon.  I  am  a  thorough  believer 
in  the  practice  of  a  certain  famous  writer  who 
sits  at  his  desk,  pen  in  hand,  from  nine  till 
twelve  every  morning,  whether  ideas  come  or 
not.  He  searches  diligently,  even  if  he  does 
not  find,  and  the  brain  finally  begins  work  with- 
out painful  urging. 

The  new  life  has  turned  out  so  well  that  I 
have  cast  my  lot  for  good  in  with  Nature. 
From  the  beginning  of  April  until  Christmas  I 
find  health  and  enjoyment  away  from  New 


54  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

York.  For  the  three  months  in  winter  we 
board  in  the  city,  the  children  counting  the 
weeks  in  their  impatience  to  get  back  to  the 
fields,  even  snow-covered  fields.  Had  I  now  to 
choose  between  giving  up  the  city  altogether 
and  returning  to  the  old  life  of  desk-work  the 
year  round,  I  should  accept  the  out-door  exist- 
ence without  a  moment's  hesitation,  both  for 
myself  and  my  children.  It  was  found  that  to 
build  a  house  such  as  we  required  was  better 
than  continuing  to  pay  rent,  and  for  a  year 
preparations  were  made  for  this  country  home 
which  should  satisfy  our  aesthetic  tastes  and  at 
the  same  time  cost  but  little  money. 

The  house  stands  upon  a  bluff,  overlooking  a 
bay,  which  spreads  east  and  west  for  many 
miles,  bounded  on  the  south  by  a  long  strip  of 
barren  sand.  The  water  is  not  more  than  two 
minutes'  walk  away,  and  at  the  foot  of  the 
country  road  which  leads  down  from  the  garden 
to  the  beach,  there  is  a  little  dock  jutting  out 
forty  or  fifty  feet  into  the  water,  far  enough  to 
allow  sail-boats  to  be  drawn  up  to  it.  In  out- 
side appearance  the  house  has  something  of  the 
English  farm-house.  The  roof  slopes  east  and 
west  from  a  central  ridge-pole,  with  no  break  of 


HOME.  55 

any  kind  except  at  the  west  end,  where  a  big 
and  square  chimney-stack  rises  to  a  few  feet 
above  the  level  of  the  ridge-pole.  On  the  east 
end  of  the  house  the  roof  slants  down  over  a 
piazza,  which  is  always  shady  in  the  afternoons. 
Part  of  the  piazza  at  the  northeast  corner  is 
taken  up  with  a  small  reception-room,  opening 
upon  the  piazza,  and  through  which  people 
must  pass  in  order  to  get  into  the  house  itself. 
From  this  reception-room  portieres  open  to  the 
main  room  of  the  house,  which  is  living-room, 
library,  music-room,  and  everything  but  dining- 
room  and  kitchen  in  one ;  when  we  have  a 
crowd,  it  is  a  dining-room  too.  It  is  thirty  feet 
wide,  the  whole  width  of  the  house,  and  thirty- 
five  feet  long.  At  the  end  opposite  the  entrance 
is  a  monumental  fireplace,  built  of  brick  rather 
than  rough  stone,  because  stone  is  scarce  in  this 
part  of  the  world.  The  opening  is  large  enough 
to  allow  big  logs  six  feet  long  to  be  thrown  upon 
the  fire,  and  at  least  four  feet  deep.  Above 
the  fireplace  and  the  old-fashioned  mantle-ledge, 
which  holds  a  collection  of  more  or  less  dam- 
aged bric-a-brac,  is  a  device  which  perhaps 
only  a  musician  would  understand  or  care  for. 
A  broad  frieze  seven  feet  wide  and  three  feet 


$6  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

high  has  been  laid  off  in  black  mortar,  and  upon 
this  background  music-staves  have  been  out- 
lined with  small  white  sea  pebbles.  Upon 
these  staves  is  the  beginning  of  the  fire-motive 
which  is  heard  at  the  end  of  Wagner's  "  Wal- 
kiire,"  when  Wotan,  the  great  god  of  northern 
mythology,  calls  upon  Loge,  the  god  of  Fire, 
to  surround  the  sleeping  Brunhilde  with  fierce 
flames. 

The  plaster  of  this  big  room  is  purposely  left 
rough,  and  is  colored  a  sombre  red.  Across  the 
ceiling  goes  a  big  beam  or  girder  a  foot  square, 
and  were  it  not  for  the  cold  winds  of  November 
and  December,  no  plaster  at  all  need  have  been 
used.  Around  the  whole  room,  in  lieu  of  a  cor- 
nice, or  frieze,  runs  a  series  of  silhouettes  of 
life-size  heads  of  friends  of  the  family  who  have 
been  inmates  of  the  house  at  one  time  or  an- 
other. Such  silhouettes,  if  cut  out  of  light- 
brown  paper,  show  the  profile  outlined  upon  a 
black  background  with  extraordinary  vividness; 
the  process  of  making  them  is  so  simple  that 
almost  every  one  has  tried  it.  With  a  candle 
and  a  sheet  of  paper  the  shadow  of  a  head 
is  thrown  upon  any  paper  screen,  and  a  pencil 
mark  will  indicate  where  the  cutting  is  to  be 


HOME.  57 

done.  Underneath  each  head  is  the  date  in 
big  black  letters,  painted  in  with  a  brush.  It  is 
impossible  to  feel  lonely  with  such  shades,  liter- 
ally, around  one. 

At  one  side  of  the  big  room  the  staircase 
rises  up  and  passes  in  a  little  gallery,  almost 
over  the  fireplace.  Underneath  the  stairs  and 
alongside  of  the  big  chimney-place  is  a  door 
opening  into  a  very  small  dining-room.  Right 
back  of  the  main  fireplace  is  the  kitchen.  The 
whole  house  measures  thirty  feet  in  width  by 
fifty  feet  in  length,  including  the  piazza.  The 
main  room  is  thirty  feet  wide  by  thirty-five  feet 
in  length,  and  has  windows  opening  on  the  pi- 
azza to  the  east,  on  the  sea,  or  the  bay,  to  the 
south,  and  on  the  moors  to  the  north.  Yet  it 
is  so  placed  that  the  last  rays  of  the  setting  sun 
get  into  the  house.  On  the  north  side  of  the 
building,  which  is  shingled  from  top  to  bottom, 
and  has  never  been  painted,  the  storms  of  win- 
ter and  the  sun  of  summer  gradually  giving  it 
a  silver  hue  beyond  the  beauty  of  any  artificial 
paint,  is  a  tennis-court,  shaded  in  the  afternoon 
by  the  house.  Back,  there  is  a  garden,  small 
but  perfectly  kept  up,  a  chicken-yard,  an  apiary, 
and  other  out-houses.  The  nearness  to  the  sea 


$8  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

is  hinted  at  by  the  presence  of  some  whales' 
vertebrae,  in  the  shape  of  seats  sprinkled  around 
the  grounds.  The  orchard,  which  is  at  the 
back  of  the  lot,  does  not  count  for  much  except 
in  the  matter  of  pears,  which  are  wonderfully 
successful  in  our  part  of  the  world. 

Such  a  house  as  this,  finished  in  the  roughest 
shape,  but  beautified  by  loving  hands,  and  liter- 
ally strewn  with  bits  of  color  in  the  shape  of  a 
rug  here,  a  gigantic  Japanese  fan  there,  a  palm- 
tree  in  this  corner,  and  no  end  of  pottery  of  the 
most  flamboyant  type,  has  a  character  which  no 
amount  of  expensive  commonplace  work  can 
give.  Its  glory  is  the  size  of  its  chief  room. 
There  is  scarcely  a  private  house  within  miles 
which  boasts  a  room  of  that  size,  and  with 
all  its  roughness,  size  produces  a  good 
effect.  In  its  present  shape,  with  the  five 
small  bedrooms  upstairs  finished  in  the  very 
cheapest  manner,  the  total  cost  of  the  house 
has  been  under  $1,600.  Counting  the  cost  of 
some  of  the  ornamental  woodwork,  which  I 
have  done  myself  as  a  matter  of  personal  pride, 
perhaps  the  whole  building  might  cost  to  du- 
plicate $1,700.  Yet  the  kitchen  has  all  the 
conveniences  of  a  city  house.  The  range  gives 


HOME.  59 

hot  and  cold  water  ;  there  are  stationary  tubs ; 
and  a  small  wind-mill  on  the  little  tool  house 
near  the  orchard  pumps  all  the  water  to  the 
tank  that  the  house  can  use.  As  we  are  near 
the  sea,  it  is  rare  that  the  breeze  is  not  sufficient 
to  turn  the  mill,  which  cost  less  than  $200  all 
complete.  The  well  is  a  driven  one,  and  gives 
an  inexhaustible  supply  of  good  water. 

It  is  hard  to  give  in  words  any  thing  like  an 
adequate  picture  of  this  home.  Take  a  hot 
night  in  summer,  with  the  breeze  blowing  right 
across  our  big  room,  and  there  is  no  more  de- 
lightful place  for  music  and  talk.  Until  long 
after  dark  the  only  light  comes  from  the  small 
lamp  inside  a  big  swinging  wrought-iron  bell 
which  hangs  in  the  centre  of  the  room,  a  piece 
which  I  picked  up  years  ago  in  a  junk  shop  ; 
it  may  have  been  intended  for  a  hanging  lamp, 
but  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  it  was  originally 
part  of  the  balcony  railing  of  an  old-fashioned 
house  in  lower  Broadway.  At  all  events,  it 
serves  its  present  purpose  admirably.  The 
opalescent  glass  with  which  it  is  now  fitted 
casts  a  subdued  light  throughout  even  so  big  a 
room  as  ours.  If  it  is  pleasant  in  summer,  it  is 
better  in  winter.  Upon  one  of  our  cold  blowy 


60  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

days  in  November  I  know  nothing  so  inspirit- 
ing as  to  get  home  from  my  oystering  or  fish- 
ing  or  hunting,  to  find  the  big  room  a  blaze  of 
light  from  a  royal  fire  of  logs,  the  candles  or 
the  lamps  giving  the  right  points  of  color 
throughout,  the  warmth  and  the  brightness 
making  a  strong  contrast  with  the  cold  wind 
outside  and  the  coming  darkness. 

The  effect  of  such  a  room  is  due  largely  to 
size,  and  next,  to  color.  Its  size  would  give  it 
a  certain  air  even  if  the  walls  and  ceiling  were 
of  unpainted  pine.  But  color  may  be  called 
to  the  rescue,  at  almost  no  expense.  For  the 
sake  of  warmth  in  cold  weather,  as  we  stay 
here  until  Christmas,  and  might  want  to  stay 
here  all  the  year  round,  the  walls  have  been 
well  plastered  with  rough  plaster  tinted  a  dark 
gray,  and  forming  an  admirable  background 
for  such  pictures,  skins,  and  bits  of  bric-a-brac 
and  color  as  we  hang  around.  To  plaster 
the  ceiling  would  have  given  an  immense 
stretch  of  plain  surface  almost  unbroken  by 
light  and  shade,  and  to  avoid  this  the  beams 
have  been  left  open,  with  the  immense  girder 
running  across  the  middle  of  the  room  at  right 
angles  with  its  length.  Girder  and  beams  have 


HOME.  6 1 

not  even  been  planed;  the  girder  still  shows 
the  marks  of  the  axe,  and  here  again  rough 
color  comes  to  the  rescue,  for  at  a  cost  of  less 
than  five  dollars  the  whole  ceiling  has  been 
painted  a  rough  brown  red,  giving  an  infinite 
variety  of  nooks  and  corners  in  which  the 
shadows  play.  The  frieze  which  runs  round 
the  room  three  feet  from  the  ceiling,  and  of  the 
decoration  of  which  in  silhouettes  I  have 
already  spoken,  is  painted  very  nearly  black. 
All  the  painting  done  in  this  room  will  last  a 
generation,  and  need  never  be  renewed,  so  far 
as  actual  effect  goes.  The  woodwork  within 
reach,  the  doors,  the  floor,  the  stairs,  the  window 
boxes  and  seats  are  all  oiled  pine,  which  may 
be  kept  in  admirable  order  at  the  expense  of 
about  ten  cents  a  month  for  kerosene  and  a 
little  labor  in  applying  it.  I  have  not  yet  tried 
a  winter  in  this  house,  but  from  the  effect  of 
cold  storms  in  the  late  autumn,  I  imagine  that 
it  may  be  necessary  to  establish  a  large  self- 
feeding  stove  in  one  corner  of  the  big  room, 
and  perhaps  carry  the  pipes  across  the  room  to 
the  chimney.  For  the  heating  of  the  upper 
part  of  the  house,  I  shall  try,  should  we  ever 
need  to  live  in  it  after  Christmas,  a  plan  which 


62  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

has  worked  admirably  elsewhere — namely,  to 
cut  square  register  holes  in  the  flooring  of  the 
upper  rooms  and  trust  to  the  heat  from  the 
living  room  rising  sufficiently  to  keep  water 
from  freezing  in  the  bedroom  pitchers.  Two 
of  our  upstairs  rooms  are  provided  with  open 
hearths,  and  should  it  become  necessary  to  heat 
any  one  of  the  other  bedrooms,  a  small  stove, 
with  the  pipe  running  through  the  hall  to  the 
chimney,  will  be  wholly  sufficient.  We  are 
certain  to  have  plenty  of  air  in  such  a  house, 
and  we  want  it.  Some  statistics  which  I  quote 
elsewhere  from  Dr.  G.  B.  Barron,  an  English  au- 
thority, upon  the  effect  of  living  in  small  rooms, 
may  be  read  with  interest  in  this  connection. 

Housekeeping  in  this  house  has  been  reduced 
to  scientific  simplicity  and  I  will  venture  to  say 
that  no  time  or  money  is  wasted.  Some  of  our 
devices  partake  a  good  deal  of  the  pic-nic.  For 
instance,  with  a  view  to  saving  all  the  labor 
possible,  there  is  but  little  washing  done.  The 
children  dress  in  flannel,  and  to  avoid  washing 
dishes  we  have  found  it  possible  to  use  wooden 
plates  for  certain  meals,  such  as  crab  suppers ; 
wooden  plates  can  be  bought  for  nothing  and 
become  excellent  firewood. 


HOME.  63 

In  order  to  rent  such  a  house  in  the  country, 
if  such  a  house  can  be  found,  which  is  very  un- 
likely, one  would  have  to  pay  at  least  four  or 
five  hundred  dollars  a  summer,  especially  if  it 
was  furnished  so  as  to  be  comfortable  for  a 
large  family.  A  piano,  for  instance,  and  a  good 
one,  is  a  necessity  with  us.  Good  lamps  for 
evenings,  and  ample  fireplaces  are  also  neces- 
sary. By  making  our  home  in  the  wilderness, 
if  a  lovely  little  village  can  be  called  a  wilder- 
ness, we  are  able  to  fit  it  with  every  con- 
venience and  comfort,  for  such  things  cost  but 
little  money,  after  all.  I  do  not  suppose  that 
my  whole  investment,  land  and  buildings,  but 
not  including  the  furniture,  rugs,  and  fixtures 
that  were  brought  here  from  the  city  when  I 
gave  up  work  for  sport,  would  represent  an 
outlay  of  more  than  $3,000,  and  in  estimating 
my  yearly  expenses,  I  put  down  rent  as  $150  a 
year,  that  being  the  interest  upon  this  amount. 

As  I  needed  no  large  amount  of  land,  for  an 
acre  suffices  amply  for  all  my  purposes,  I  was 
enabled  to  buy  almost  in  the  heart  of  a  village 
where  land  always  has  a  certain  value  ;  and  cer- 
tainly with  the  improvements  I  have  made  my 
purchase  has  not  deteriorated.  Had  I  been 


64  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

compelled  to  go  far  away  from  the  village,  such 
a  thing  as  selling  out  would  have  been  out  of 
the  question,  for  of  all  the  impossible  things  to 
sell,  country  property  far  from  a  station  is  the 
most  hopeless.  Not  that  I  have  any  idea  of 
selling,  and  I  will  not  even  give  the  name  of 
the  little  village  where  we  have  found  a  home, 
for  fear  that  I  may  be  suspected  of  wishing  to 
raise  the  price  of  land  by  singing  its  praises. 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN. 

T  HAVE  tried  this  country  life  and  found  that 
it  answers  all  the  requirements  of  my  mod- 
est way  of  living.  In  looking  over  my  sources 
of  income,  I  should  place  my  garden  first 
and  my  poultry-yard  next.  Of  course,  after 
some  years  of  experimenting,  I  have  dis- 
covered other,  but  subordinate  sources  of 
income.  For  instance,  having  much  time  upon 
my  hand  and  aiming  to  get  all  the  sunshine  and 
fresh  air  and  physical  exercise  that  I  can  find 
during  nine  months  in  the  year  on  my  country 
acre,  I  took  up  a  good  many  little  schemes  for 
money-making,  or  rather  money-saving,  for  I 
believe  that  the  city  man  who  retires  to  the 
wilderness  with  the  idea  that  he  is  going  to 
make  money  there,  will,  in  ninety-nine  cases 
out  of  a  hundred,  be  disappointed.  I  can  save 
money  in  the  country  by  providing  things  that 
we  should  buy  almost  as  necessaries — for  in- 
stance, vegetables,  eggs,  honey,  fish,  oysters, 
65 


66  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

small  fruits,  and  wood  for  open  fires.  The  man 
who,  having  managed  to  obtain  a  little  place  of 
his  own,  even  if  not  more  than  an  acre  or  two 
in  extent,  will  be  singularly  unfortunate  in  my 
opinion,  or  will  work  with  bad  judgment,  if  he 
does  not  succeed  in  providing  for  his  family  all 
the  vegetables,  both  for  winter  and  summer, 
that  they  can  use,  all  the  small  fruits,  all  the 
eggs  and  chickens,  and,  if  he  is  on  the  sea-shore, 
all  the  shell-fish  that  the  neighborhood  affords. 
To  go  into  details,  and  taking  my  own  case 
because,  having  done  what  I  have  done  without 
much  special  knowledge  and  no  apprentice- 
ship, so  to  speak,  any  one  else  animated  with 
a  love  of  out-door  work  will  be  able  to  do  as 
much,  or  more,  here  is  a  list  of  the  things  which 
I  have  been  able  to  provide  in  sufficient  quan- 
tity for  a  large  family:  vegetables  in  profu- 
sion throughout  the  summer,  and  enough  for  a 
large  part  of  the  winter;  strawberries  and  small 
fruits,  more  than  could  be  used  ;  ten  times  the 
honey  that  could  be  used  winter  and  summer, 
the  honey  sold  being  part  of  the  actual  money 
income  of  the  year ;  during  autumn  and  early 
winter,  all  the  oysters  and  crabs  that  the  family 
could  be  prevailed  upon  to  eat,  the  children  at 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    6/ 

last  refusing  to  accept  oysters  in  any  shape  as  a 
substitute  for  meat ;  all  the  eggs  and  more  than 
could  be  used,  and  chickens  for  the  table  from 
the  end  of  July  until  far  into  the  winter.  With 
the  additional  experience  of  several  years  of 
this  life  I  find  other  sources  of  income  looming 
up,  or  rather  of  money-saving,  for  I  should  like 
to  emphasize  the  idea  that  it  is  not  money- 
making  I  aim  at.  Some  of  my  friends  have  suc- 
ceeded admirably  with  pigeons ;  others  have 
done  wonders  with  mushrooms,  an  acquaintance 
of  mine  out  in  Jersey  having  paid  his  rent  and 
the  wages  of  a  man  out  of  the  proceeds  of  one 
small  mushroom  house  not  twenty-five  feet 
square.  These  are  things  for  future  experi- 
menting with  me,  but  of  the  others  I  can  speak 
with  knowledge. 

At  the  same  time  I  would  warn  any  one  that 
there  is  a  certain  amount  of  danger,  the  worst 
side  of  the  picture  having  been  set  forth  amus- 
ingly, although  too  flippantly,  in  my  opinion,  by 
Mr.  Robert  Roosevelt,  in  his  amusing  book, 
"  Five  Acres  Too  Much."  As  I  have  already 
hinted  in  my  garden  talk,  there  must  be  hard 
work  and  systematic  work,  and  work  done  in 
person,  and  not  by  proxy.  It  may  be  said  that 


68  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  hired  man  is  the  bane  of  every  garden  so 
far  as  actual  money-saving  is  concerned  ;  ten  to 
one  the  inexperienced  city  man  will  find  the 
wages  of  his  man  about  double  the  value  of  the 
vegetables  or  fruits  obtained.  There  are  seasons 
of  extraordinarily  bad  luck  in  gardening — no 
rain,  or  too  much  rain  ;  no  sun,  or  all  sun  ;  but 
with  a  small  garden  of  an  acre  or  less  the 
intelligent  workman  is  almost  master  of  the 
situation.  I  can  point  to  no  great  money-making 
operations  as  the  result  of  my  own  gardening, 
but  I  know  of  more  than  one  instance  in  which 
high  culture  of  a  careful  and  intelligent  kind 
upon  one  acre  of  land  has  produced  a  money 
profit  of  $1,200  in  one  year.  This,  to  be  sure, 
was  done  in  the  neighborhood  of  high-priced 
markets,  and  by  an  expert.  The  secret  of  it, 
as  I  learned  by  watching  the  process  almost  day 
by  day,  was  to  allow  no  bit  of  the  plot  to  go  to 
waste.  Every  square  foot  of  the  43,560  square 
feet  in  that  acre  bore  its  crop,  and  bore  the  best 
crop  that  could  be  obtained  from  it  and  nothing 
else.  The  secret  of  keeping  down  weeds  was 
never  to  let  them  get  a  beginning.  One  man 
was  employed  in  doing  nothing  but  stir  up 
the  earth  with  a  cultivator,  with  the  result  that 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    69 

every  bit  of  good  in  the  earth  and  in  the 
manure  that  was  put  into  it  went  into  the 
vegetables.  You  cannot  raise  two  crops  at  the 
same  time  from  the  same  ground,  and  it  must 
always  be  borne  in  mind  that  between  vege- 
tables and  weeds,  the  weeds  are  by  far  the  hard- 
iest and  most  voracious. 

Mr.  Roosevelt,  in  his  "  Five  Acres  Too  Much," 
seems  to  have  had  peculiarly  bad  luck  from 
beginning  to  end.  Every  thing  that  he  took 
hold  of — cow,  pigs,  horse,  garden,  fruit-trees, 
strawberries,  chickens — turned  out  badly,  and 
he  could  not  find  enough  to  say  of  the  misery 
of  his  experience.  He  admitted  that  he  had 
been  led  to  that  experiment  by  reading  "Ten 
Acres  Enough."  I  will  confess  that  I  was  led 
to  my  experiments  by  the  same  book,  but  my 
experience  has  been  entirely  satisfactory  to 
myself,  and  I  should  be  sorry  to  think  that  it 
was  beyond  me  to  keep  a  small  garden  in  beau- 
tiful order  and  raise  a  lot  of  chickens. 

The  poultry  question  has  been  so  often  gone 
over,  and  so  many  columns  have  been  written 
about  the  vast  sums  of  money  to  be  made  by 
raising  poultry,  by  sending  spring  chickens  to 
market,  or  by  selling  eggs  when  they  are  dear, 


7O  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

that  it  is  scarcely  worth  while  to  say  more  than 
a  word  about  my  chickens  here.  I  have  in- 
variably found  that  the  schemes  of  my  friends 
who  went  into  poultry-raising  as  a  business,  and 
several  of  them  have  done  so,  turned  out  badly, 
partly  because  they  expected  to  make  money 
out  of  the  business  instead  of  a  mere  living,  and 
partly  because  the  keeping  of  1,000  chickens 
seems  to  be  a  dangerous  proceeding — to  the 
chickens.  In  my  own  case  I  have  never  at- 
tempted to  have  more  than  fifty  chickens  at  a 
time.  With  an  insignificant  expenditure  this 
flock  has  proved  to  be  quite  sufficient.  Again 
this  is  a  case  where  simple  care  and  system  are 
necessary.  In  the  poultry-yard  as  well  as  in 
the  garden  beautiful  order  and  precision  in 
work  pay.  In  our  part  of  the  country  ducks 
have  also  proved  to  be  one  of  the  native  re- 
sources, but  of  that  I  have  no  personal 
knowledge. 

As  to  the  resources  of  the  water,  every  one 
cannot  live  at  the  sea-shore,  and  even  at  the 
sea-shore  there  is  not  always  an  oyster  bed  near, 
or  clams,  or  even  great  lots  of  crabs.  Friends 
of  mine  who  have  attempted  for  a  few  months 
something  of  the  same  life  that  I  lead  nine 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    /I 

months  in  the  year  and  have  pitched  their  tents 
on  the  Massachusetts  coast,  really  seem  to  get 
more  out  of  the  water  than  out  of  the  land. 
They  get  an  extraordinary  number  of  fish,  lob- 
sters, and  clams,  they  get  sea-weed  which  they 
use  as  manure,  and  scarcely  a  day  passes  but 
some  kind  of  sea  food  does  not  make  its  ap- 
pearance upon  their  table.  I  have  never  been 
so  fortunate  as  to  be  placed  where  the  fishing 
was  of  such  a  nature  that  I  could  depend  upon 
it  from  day  to  day  to  furnish  the  table.  Never- 
theless, I  have  no  doubt  that  during  the  sum- 
mer and  autumn  I  have  provided  more  than 
fifty  dollars'  worth  of  good  fish  of  various  kinds, 
and  I  leave  out  of  account  entirely  the  oysters, 
because  they  can  be  had  for  almost  the  picking 
up  where  we  are.  With  us  the  bay  furnishes 
perhaps  the  most  valuable  manure  to  be  found 
along  the  coast — the  bony  fish  which  the  fisher- 
men get  in  their  nets  in  enormous  quantities 
and  either  sell  to  factories  where  the  oil  is 
squeezed  out  of  them  or  throw  them  on  the 
land  to  be  used  by  the  farmers  as  manure. 
Making  a  liberal  estimate,  I  should  think  that 
the  actual  money  value  of  the  fish,  crabs,  and 
oysters  that  I  get  during  the  summer  must  be 


72  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

at  the  least  one  hundred  dollars,  and  this  is 
sport,  as  many  city  men  will  admit,  and  none 
the  less  sport  because  done  week  after  week, 
and  not  during  a  few  days'  escape  from  the 
city. 

I  still  remember  with  something  like  enthu- 
siasm the  impression  that  the  famous  book — 
much  ridiculed  but  nevertheless  of  serious  value 
to  so  many  persons — "  Ten  Acres  Enough," 
made  upon  me  many  years  ago.  At  the  time 
when  I  came  across  it  by  chance  I  was  very 
tired  of  city  life,  of  late  hours  and  long  hours, 
of  nervous  strain,  of  incessant  work  with  few 
breathing  spells.  My  routine  at  that  time  con- 
sisted of  steady  labor  from  nine  o'clock  in  the 
morning  until  twelve  o'clock  at  night  with  very 
few  intervals  for  rest  and  recreation.  And  then  it 
often  occurred  that  work  which  had  to  be  done 
took  me  out  of  bed  long  before  daylight.  Four 
years  of  this  sort  of  drudgery  with  very  small 
prospects  of  release  in  the  future  or  of  re- 
ward which  would  have  made  such  toil  bear- 
able, often  caused  me  to  turn  over  in  my  mind 
whether  there  was  not  some  avenue  of  escape. 
As  country  pursuits  had  always  had  a  fascina- 
tion for  me  from  childhood,  I  had  heard  more 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    73 

or  less  of  the  famous  "Ten  Acres  Enough." 
One  night  as  I  was  leaving  my  office  a  friend 
presented  me  with  an  old  copy  of  the  book, 
which  he  said  would  interest  me  as  I  was  fond 
of  preaching  upon  the  superiority  of  country 
life  to  city  life.  On  the  way  home  I  opened  it 
with  but  small  expectations  that  any  thing  in 
it  could  apply  to  my  own  case.  With  all  my 
love  for  the  country  and  for  country  pursuits  I 
had  never  thought  of  myself  as  a  practical 
farmer  or  of  the  possibility  of  making  any  kind 
of  a  living  out  of  the  soil.  It  has  been  pointed 
out  to  me  too  often  that  while  potatoes  and 
cabbages  are  raised  all  about  New  York  by 
men  who  make  a  poor  living  at  it,  any  German 
or  Irishman  just  landed  at  Castle  Garden  could 
raise  more  potatoes  or  cabbages  than  I  because 
he  would  have  more  muscle  to  put  into  the 
work. 

Many  of  my  readers  may  happen  to  know 
that  "  Ten  Acres  Enough  "  is  the  record  of  the 
successful  attempt  of  a  Philadelphia  merchant 
to  support  himself  and  his  family  by  raising 
strawberries  and  other  small  fruits.  Middle  life 
had  found  him  no  nearer  fortune  than  when  he 
began  ;  he  felt  that  strength  was  ebbing  away 


74  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

and  he  was  losing  enthusiasm ;  business  cares 
were  becoming  thicker  rather  than  otherwise. 
Notes  had  to  be  met  which  caused  him  constant 
anxiety.  He  could  take  no  pleasure  in  life.  One 
day  a  friend  suggested  to  him  to  drop  the  whole 
effort  for  a  fortune  and  try  for  a  comfortable 
living  in  quieter,  less  ambitious,  but  safer  fields. 
He  took  the  advice  and  sold  out  his  business, 
realizing  two  thousand  dollars,  with  which  sum 
he  bought  a  little  place  of  ten  acres  eight 
miles  from  Philadelphia,  and  planted  it  mostly 
with  strawberries.  The  book  gives  the  results 
of  five  years'  work,  with  figures  showing  exactly 
what  money  came  in  and  what  went  out.  At 
the  end  of  the  five  years  he  had  recovered 
health  and  spirits ;  he  had  kept  his  family  in 
comfort ;  he  had  lived  an  out-door  life  of  far 
more  interest  to  himself  than  any  business  life 
could  have  been  ;  and  he  found  his  property 
more  valuable  and  his  bank  account  larger  than 
when  he  began.  I  confess  that  once  having 
plunged  into  "  Ten  Acres  Enough  "  I  read  the 
book  through  with  more  eager  interest  than  if 
it  had  been  the  most  absorbing  novel.  Here 
was  what  I  had  been  looking  for.  I  loved  sun- 
shine, I  was  fond  of  gardening,  I  had  a  passion 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    ?$ 

for  grubbing  in  the  earth,  for  watching  things 
grow.  I  have  had  many  years  of  city  life,  and 
far  more  than  my  share  of  city  amusements  as 
my  connection  with  newspapers  has  supplied  me 
with  tickets  to  all  places  of  entertainment.  I 
said  to  myself  :  "This  is  the  life  for  me  ;  I  will 
raise  strawberries,  raspberries,  blackberries,  and 
other  pleasant  things,  and  if  I  do  not  grow  rich 
I  shall  at  least  have  strength  and  health  where- 
with to  enjoy  the  sunlight  and  the  country 
air." 

For  months  this  idea  haunted  me  without 
taking  practical  shape.  It  is  no  easy  matter  for 
a  man  absorbed  in  professional  life,  especially 
newspaper  life,  to  get  out  of  it,  and  without 
capital  as  I  was,  the  notion  had  something  un- 
pleasant about  it.  To  cut  loose  from  an  assured 
income  was  dangerous.  The  strawberries  might 
not  grow,  the  drought  might  kill  my  blackber- 
ries, there  might  be  a  glut  in  the  market  when 
I  came  to  sell,  even  if  I  had  any  thing  to  sell. 
I  might  get  tired  of  solitude,  and  might  yearn 
for  the  nervous  activity  of  the  city  again.  I 
might  come  to  think  that  a  good  opera  was 
worth  a  million  strawberry  plants,  and  the  end 
might  be— as  most  of  my  friends  predicted—^ 


76  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

that  I  should  sell  my  ten  acres  at  a  tremendous 
sacrifice,  and  take  up  my  newspaper  work  again 
under  greater  disadvantages  than  ever.  Never- 
theless, so  firmly  was  I  convinced  that  there  is 
a  joy  in  gardening  well  worth  striving  for,  that 
when  spring  opened  I  took  a  little  house  in 
New  Jersey  and  began  to  feel  my  way  along. 
I  was  quite  convinced  that  for  a  man  who  knew 
nothing  about  gardening  except  theoretically, 
only  failure  would  result  from  burning  my  ships 
behind  me  at  once.  So  I  kept  on  with  my 
work  in  the  city,  but  moved  out  to  the  country, 
taking  a  little  place  with  a  small  garden. 
Meantime  I  bought  every  popular  book  bearing 
upon  the  subject  of  gardening,  and  I  subscribed 
to  several  agricultural  newspapers,  which  I  read 
with  conscientious  thoroughness.  I  have  quite 
a  little  library  upon  agricultural  matters,  col- 
lected that  spring  and  summer. 

My  garden,  to  begin  with,  was  in  the  most 
rudimentary  condition,  having  been  allowed  to 
run  to  grass.  After  digging  up  a  spot  about 
ten  feet  square  in  the  turf,  taking  the  early 
morning  for  the  work,  I  decided  that  it  would 
require  all  summer  to  get  the  garden  fairly 
spaded  up,  and  so  I  hired  a  stalwart  Irishman 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN,    fj 

to  do  the  work  for  me,  which  he  did  in  a  week, 
charging  me  nine  dollars  for  the  job.  As  he 
professed  to  be  also  an  expert  in  planting  vege- 
tables, I  bought  a  supply  of  seeds  in  the  city 
and  entrusted  them  to  him,  assuring  myself 
that  once  in  the  ground  the  rest  of  the  work 
would  fall  to  me ;  if  I  could  not  keep  a  garden 
patch  fifty  feet  square  clear  of  weeds,  I  had 
better  abandon  the  business  at  once,  and  all 
hopes  of  making  a  living  out  of  scientific  gar- 
dening. The  beginning  was  an  unfortunate 
one.  The  weather  happened  to  be  first  very 
wet,  and  then  so  dry  and  hot  that  my  vege- 
tables were  unable  to  break  their  way  through 
the  baked  earth.  When  my  peas  and  beans 
still  gave  no  signs  after  being  in  the  ground  two 
weeks,  I  discovered  that  the  whole  work  would 
have  to  be  done  over  again.  A  Presidential 
campaign  was  beginning  which  kept  me  in  town 
often  late  at  night,  so  that  the  chief  labor  of 
the  garden  fell  to  my  faithful  Irishman,  who 
got  far  more  satisfaction  out  of  it  than  I  did. 
The  vegetables  finally  did  come  up  above  the 
surface,  and  many  an  evening  I  finished  a  hard 
day's  work  by  pumping  and  carrying  hundreds 
of  gallons  of  water  to  pour  upon  potato  plants, 


78  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

tomato  plants,  bean  stalks,  and  other  things 
which  a  friend  of  mine,  an  expert  in  such 
matters,  assured  me  were  curiosities  of  mal- 
formation and  backwardness.  My  Irishman 
told  me  that  it  was  all  for  want  of  manure,  and 
by  his  advice  I  bought  six  dollars'  worth  of 
manure  from  a  neighboring  stable,  and  had  it 
spread  over  the  ground.  The  bills  for  my  gar- 
den were  meanwhile  mounting  up.  I  had 
begun  the  spring  with  a  garden  ledger,  keeping 
an  accurate  account  of  every  penny  spent,  and 
hoping  to  put  on  the  other  side  of  the  page  a 
tremendous  list  of  fine  vegetables.  The  ac- 
counts are  before  me  now,  and  I  presume  that 
every  one  who  has  been  through  the  same  ex- 
perience has  preserved  some  such  record. 

The  tools,  rakes,  forks,  spades,  hose,  water- 
ing pots,  lawn-mower,  etc.,  cost  me  $18. 
Wages  to  my  stalwart  friend  during  the 
whole  season  were  $26.00;  seeds  were  $2.80, 
manure,  $6.00 ;  wire  fencing,  made  neces- 
sary in  order  to  keep  out  a  flock  of  my  neigh- 
bors' hens  laboring  under  the  idea  that  in 
my  garden  were  to  be  found  the  best  insects 
of  the  whole  neighborhood,  and  acting  upon 
this  belief,  $5.00— total,  $57.80.  Of  this 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS— MY  GARDEN.    79 

amount  the  tools  and  the  wire  fencing — say 
$20 — may  be  looked  upon  as  well  invested  for 
the  future,  so  that  my  actual  outlay,  for  which 
I  should  receive  an  equivalent  in  the  shape  of 
vegetables,  was  about  $37.  The  list  of  vege- 
tables begins  with  entries  day  by  day ;  then  the 
garden  produce  is  lumped  at  the  end  of  the 
week;  and  finally  in  September  the  garden 
appears  to  have  yielded  nothing  but  tomatoes 
and  beets,  the  potatoes  having  failed  to  come 
to  any  thing,  owing  to  a  variety  of  causes, 
which  my  assistant  explained  in  different  ways 
on  different  occasions.  One  day  he  said  that 
the  potato  bugs  had  done  it,  and  another  day 
he  was  convinced  that  if  I  had  put  in  manure 
enough  earlier  in  the  season  I  might  have  had 
splendid  potatoes.  In  other  words,  if  I  had 
spent  ten  dollars  for  manure,  and  had  given  up 
my  days  to  fighting  the  bugs,  I  might  have  had 
five  dollars'  worth  of  potatoes  in  return. 

The  first  entry  of  vegetables  is  in  a  bold  hand, 
and  is  to  the  effect  that  on  the  loth  of  June 
we  had  some  radishes  of  an  estimated  market 
value  of  five  cents.  Then  come  lettuce  and 
peas,  and  later  on  spinach,  beans,  radishes, 
carrots,  and  finally  tomatoes  in  profusion.  For 


8O  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

some  purpose  which  I  could  never  fathom,  half 
of  my  garden  plot  was  planted  with  cucumbers 
of  a  particularly  hard  and  leathery  type.  They 
throve  in  the  most  wonderful  fashion,  and  there 
were  bushels  of  them,  of  no  earthly  use  to  any 
one  ;  we  could  not  eat  them  or  give  them  away. 
They  rotted  where  they  grew,  and  seemed  to 
serve  no  purpose  except  perhaps  to  enable  my 
assistant  to  point  to  something  in  the  garden 
which  looked  like  a  successful  vegetable.  To 
be  brief  over  a  somewhat  painful  experiment, 
and  estimating  the  garden  stuff  that  we  really 
got  out  of  my  little  plot,  I  should  say  that  de- 
livered at  our  door  the  stuff  would  have  cost 
us  not  more  than  $15,  or  about  half  its 
actual  cost.  I  do  not  take  into  account 
the  value  of  my  work  in  hoeing  up  tons  of 
weeds  and  pouring  down  tons  of  water,  betause 
the  practical  knowledge  I  gathered  more  than 
offsets  these  tremendous  labors. 

In  the  meantime  I  had  profited  by  studying 
neighboring  gardens,  notably  a  very  beautiful 
one  belonging  to  a  neighbor  who  did  all  the 
work  himself  and  produced  a  crop  of  vegetables 
which  seemed  to  me  nothing  less  than  miracu- 
lous. Every  inch  in  this  neighbor's  garden 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN.    8 1 

seemed  to  grow  something ;  his  vegetables  took 
up  so  much  room,  were  so  close  together  that 
the  weeds  had  not  a  chance  to  squeeze  them- 
selves in.  He  worked  upon  the  theory  that 
one  square  foot  of  garden  properly  manured 
and  properly  attended  to  was  more  productive 
than  four  square  feet  half  taken  care  of,  and  his 
results  proved  the  soundness  of  his  ideas.  It 
was  owing  to  this  neighbor's  advice  that  my 
second  summer's  work  in  my  little  garden,  for  I 
was  determined  not  to  give  the  ground  up 
although  it  had  proved  a  costly  toy,  were  far 
more  satisfactory  in  every  way  than  the  first.  I 
discovered  that  my  neighbor's  total  expenses 
of  the  year  for  his  garden,  which  was  a  far 
larger  one  than  mine,  were  less  than  $10,  nine 
tenths  of  which  sum  went  for  manure.  He 
did  all  the  work  himself,  got  his  seeds  and 
plants  from  neighboring  gardens,  and  the  value 
of  his  product  exceeded  $100  during  the  sum- 
mer. This  was  something  like  gardening,  and 
if  one  man  not  a  Hercules  could  do  it,  why  not 
I  ?  My  second  summer  showed  that  by  devot- 
ing an  average  of  two  hours  a  day  to  my  little 
garden  patch  I  could  save  about  fifty  dollars  in 
the  vegetable  bill  of  the  family.  Estimating 


82  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

that  the  garden  work  begins  on  the  1st  of  May 
and  ends  on  the  1st  of  September,  we  have 
four  months,  or  120  days,  during  which  I  gave 
two  hours  a  day,  or  240  hours,  to  my  garden. 
At  ten  hours  a  day  this  represents  twenty-four 
days  or  a  month's  work.  At  my  regular  pro- 
fession I  can  make  $200  or  more  during  the 
month,  so  that  at  first  view  the  occupation  of 
raising  vegetables  does  not  appear  well,  finan- 
cially speaking.  Upon  the  other  hand,  con- 
sidering that  these  two  hours  a  day  were  to  me 
hours  of  genuine  enjoyment  and  that  the  work 
unquestionably  did  me  good  in  every  way,  I 
can  say  that  the  garden  was  a  success. 

A  good  many  years  have  passed  since  I 
began  my  little  garden  out  in  New  Jersey.  In 
the  course  of  events  I  found  myself  compelled 
to  give  up  playing  at  garden  and  to  move  back 
to  New  York.  Newspaper  life  takes  all  or 
nothing  out  of  a  man,  and  I  was  by  no  means 
ready  or  able  to  neglect  serious  work  which 
paid  me  a  very  fair  living  in  order  to  amuse 
myself  in  a  Jersey  garden.  But  during  those 
years  of  experiment  I  had  learned  a  good  deal 
about  practical  gardening.  I  learned  enough 
to  know  that  with  less  than  three  hours'  work 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN.    83 

a  day  I  can  provide  a  good-sized  family  with 
all  the  potatoes,  cabbages,  turnips,  carrots, 
onions,  and  beets  that  will  be  needed  the  year 
round  ;  all  the  raspberries,  blackberries,  straw- 
berries, and  currants  for  the  summer ;  all  the 
peas,  beans,  beets,  lettuce,  spinach,  and  toma- 
toes that  will  be  needed  in  summer.  And  I 
can  do  this  with  an  expenditure  for  manure 
not  exceeding  $12,  provided  the  ground  is  in 
reasonably  good  condition.  I  think  that  the 
reader  will  admit  that  this  is  something  well 
worth  knowing.  The  trouble  with  most  men 
who  go  into  gardening  upon  a  small  scale  is 
that  they  pay  out  money  for  what  they  should 
do  themselves  to  men  who  are  often  lazy  or 
dishonest,  and  that  while  they  themselves  may 
work  very  hard  for  a  few  hours  or  a  few  days, 
the  work  is  intermittent,  and  that  is  the  worst 
sort  of  work  for  a  garden.  With  a  garden,  the 
maxim,  "  a  stitch  in  time  saves  nine,"  is  particu- 
larly true.  I  have  seen  pieces  of  ground  in 
such  a  condition  that  in  half  an  hour's  work 
with  a  steel  hoe  I  could  kill  every  weed  there; 
three  weeks  later  to  do  the  same  thing  would 
have  required  a  day's  work  or  more,  and  then 
it  would  not  have  been  well  done.  To  manage 


84  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

a  small  garden  scientifically  is  a  matter  for  the 
most  systematic  kind  of  work.  Three  hours  a 
day  of  steady  work  upon  a  plot  100  feet  square 
will  give  every  thing  that  can  be  wanted  in  the 
shape  of  small  vegetables.  If  potatoes  and 
cabbages  are  required  a  larger  patch  will  be 
needed,  but  even  then  systematic  culture  will 
tell  wonderfully.  The  use  of  new  tools,  such 
as  the  hand  cultivator,  which  does  more  work 
in  half  an  hour  than  can  be  accomplished  with 
a  hoe  in  two  hours,  has  greatly  simplified  the 
raising  of  vegetables  in  a  small  garden.  It  is 
also  more  than  true  that  one  square  foot  well 
cared  for  is  equal  to  three  times  the  area  half 
cultivated. 

Still  another  source  of  income  which  has  been 
suggested  to  me  by  my  tramps  around  the 
country,  and  a  business  which  offers  no  extra- 
ordinary difficulties  to  the  inexperienced,  is  the 
raising  of  fine  fruits  for  our  New  York  market. 
We  have  scores  of  farmers  in  my  neighborhood 
who  make  a  living,  and  a  comfortable  one,  from 
their  fields  and  their  orchards,  and  trust  almost 
to  luck  for  the  quality  of  what  they  have  to 
sell.  I  have  been  struck  many  times  with  the 
wonderful  return  for  care  and  manure  made  by 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN.    85 

several  species  of  pear-trees  that  flourish  on 
Long  Island.  For  the  city  beginner  to  under- 
take to  raise  apples,  or  strawberries,  or  common 
pears,  or  in  fact  any  orchard  or  garden  produce 
common  in  the  markets,  is  to  experiment 
against  heavy  odds,  as  he  will  come  in  compe- 
tition with  men  who  have  been  at  it  all  their 
lives.  At  the  same  time,  perhaps  he  will  suc- 
ceed, owing  to  better  methods  and  less  de- 
pendence upon  routine.  But  what  I  should 
advise  the  city  man  who  wants  to  make  some 
money  out  of  his  six  or  eight  months'  work  in 
the  open  air,  is  to  try  for  something  not  pro- 
duced by  his  neighbors,  or  not  produced  in  the 
same  way.  For  instance,  there  are  new  kinds 
of  pears,  which  grow  profusely  in  parts  of  Jer- 
sey and  in  parts  of  Long  Island,  which  never- 
theless still  bring  a  large  amount  of  money  as 
compared  with  apples  or  ordinary  pears.  I 
should  advise  the  city  man  to  go  in  for  culture 
of  this  sort,  devoting  himself  to  an  orchard  of 
half  an  acre,  if  he  cannot  keep  any  more  trees 
in  perfect  order.  I  have  seen  such  astonishing 
results  from  these  new  species  of  pears,  that 
were  it  not  easier  for  me  to  make  more  money 
by  one  hour's  writing  a  day  than  by  ten  hours' 


86  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

work  in  an  orchard,  I  should  certainly  go  into 
the  business.  So  much  is  said  about  the  im- 
possibility of  making  any  money  at  gardening 
or  fruit-raising  that  it  is  almost  hopeless  to  con- 
vince any  one  to  the  contrary,  and  it  is  far  from 
my  wish  to  do  any  thing  of  the  kind.  My  aim 
is  to  tell  how  I  manage  to  do  without  money, 
not  how  to  make  it.  The  first  is  a  topic  upon 
which  I  have  had  some  experience,  for  reasons 
beyond  my  control,  while  as  to  the  last  I  can- 
not speak  as  an  expert.  The  scores  of  books 
which  prove  that  if  a  man  can  raise  ten  thou- 
sand quarts  of  strawberries  from  an  acre  of 
ground,  and  sell  them  at  ten  cents  a  quart,  he 
will  grow  rich  and  his  family  will  rejoice,  are 
mostly  based  upon  the  experience  of  some 
wonderfully  clever  person ;  the  truth  of  their 
theory  is  irrefutable,  provided  you  admit 
the  premises.  They  remind  me  of  a  circular 
once  sent  to  me  by  a  man  who  was  offering 
fame  and  fortune  in  return  for  ten  cents  in 
stamps.  He  set  forth  that  if  I  bought  from 
him  a  certain  prescription  for  a  magic  hair- 
grower,  to  be  manufactured  at  four  cents  a 
bottle,  fortune  was  mine.  For  if  I  sold  ten 
thousand  bottles  of  the  stuff  to  agents  at  fifteen 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN.    8/ 

cents  a  bottle,  who  in  turn  would  sell  it  at 
twenty-five  cents  a  bottle,  I  would  make  eleven 
hundred  dollars,  the  agents  would  make  a  thou- 
sand dollars,  and  the  whole  neighborhood  would 
rejoice,  except  perhaps  the  bald-headed  man 
who  bought  the  magic  restorer.  I  can  tell  peo- 
ple how  not  to  get  rich  at  newspaper  writing, 
but  I  am  not  yet  ready  to  offer  any  advice  of 
the  sort  given  in  books  patterned  after  "  Ten 
Acres  Enough."  My  ideal  orchard  is  one  given 
up  to  trees  and  grass,  and  used  for  poultry  until 
the  fruit  begins  to  fall.  The  trees,  the  grass, 
and  the  poultry  are  all  pretty  sure  to  thrive  with 
the  most  ordinary  care.  The  chickens  kill  the 
worms,  and  the  hay  crop  will  more  than  pay 
for  all  the  labor  expended  in  taking  care  of  the 
trees.  As  in  a  garden,  my  experience  has  been 
that  the  very  best  results  in  an  orchard  are  to 
be  obtained  by  the  highest  culture  of  small 
plots.  Two  apple-trees  of  a  good  sort,  kept 
well  pruned,  well  manured,  and  free  from  in- 
sects, are  likely  to  yield  as  much  fruit  as  half-a- 
dozen  neglected  trees,  and  the  picking  will  not 
entail  half  the  labor.  I  see  the  same  advice 
given  every  day  in  agricultural  papers  and 
books  throughout  the  country,  and  yet  for 


88  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

some  reason  a  really  well  kept  orchard,  with  all 
the  trees  in  prime  condition,  the  fences  in  neat 
repair,  and  not  a  superfluous  twig  to  be  seen,  is 
one  of  the  rare  sights  of  the  country.  It  is  also 
the  commonest  sight  to  find  upon  one  farm  a 
few  trees  which  give  a  splendid  grade  of  fruit, 
while  the  next  mile  or  two  will  show  nothing 
but  apples  or  pears  scarcely  worth  the  picking 
— all  because  the  man  who  planted  would  not 
take  the  trouble  to  pay  a  few  cents  more  in  or- 
der to  get  choice  stock  from  a  good  nursery. 
Of  all  the  economies  that  pay  least,  is  the 
saving  of  a  few  dollars  in  stocking  a  young 
orchard.  I  have  talked  with  many  of  our 
farmers  about  this,  and  almost  invariably  the 
blunder  is  due  to  small  economy ;  they  got 
their  trees  from  some  one  in  the  neighborhood 
who  sold  cheap  as  compared  to  the  prices  of 
first-class  nurseries,  and,  as  a  result,  year  after 
year,  their  orchards  gave  them  half  the  returns 
which  would  have  been  received  from  good 
trees.  My  ambition  is  some  day  to  prove  by 
dollars  and  cents  that  it  is  not  impossible  for  a 
city-bred  man  fond  of  country  work  to  make 
money  in  an  orchard,  for  nothing  that  I  have 
heard  to  the  contrary  (and  every  friend  that  I 


DETAILS  AND  DOLLARS — MY  GARDEN.    89 

have  warns  me  of  the  futility  of  such  an  at- 
tempt) has  convinced  me  that  starvation  lurks 
everywhere  but  in  the  dust  of  the  city  or  the 
turmoil  of  trade. 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS. 

OESIDES  my  oystering,  the  fishing  that  I 
^  have  done  has  proved  to  be  of  no  small 
value  as  part  of  our  scheme.  Unfortunately, 
since  settling  down  by  the  water  the  fishing  ap- 
pears to  have  become  somewhat  scarce  in  my 
neighborhood  as  compared  with  former  years. 
Forty  years  ago,  so  old  men  tell  me,  the  whole 
Great  South  Bay  was  full  of  salt-water  fish  ; 
there  were  inlets  from  the  ocean  at  several 
points  between  Fire  Island  and  Moriches,  and 
the  sea-water  ran  in  through  deep  channels 
which  years  ago  became  choked  up  with  sand. 
To-day  there  is  no  opening  in  the  Great  South 
Bay  to  the  ocean  except  at  Fire  Island.  At  the 
other  end  of  the  bay,  twenty-five  miles  east- 
ward, the  water  has  become  so  fresh  that  clams 
will  not  live  in  it,  and  most  fish  are  shy  about 
going  so  far  from  deep  water.  Nevertheless, 
we  catch  crabs  by  the  hundred,  and  in  the 
autumn  many  young  bluefish,  known  in  the 
90 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  Ql 

neighborhood  as  "snappers."  Once  a  week  I 
sail  my  boat  down  to  the  neighborhood  of  Fire 
Island,  where  from  June  to  November  we  get 
some  good  bluefishing,  thanks  to  our  "chum- 
ming "  machines,  a  device  for  chopping  up 
bony-fish  in  appetizing  shape.  The  boat  is 
brought  to  anchor,  the  sails  furled,  and  this 
chopped  fish  is  thrown  overboard  in  small 
quantities.  The  bluefish,  running  in  or  out 
with  the  tide,  are  attracted  by  the  "  chum," 
and  come  to  feed.  The  hooks  are  baited,  and 
thrown  overboard  along  with  the  chum.  If  fish 
are  plenty,  the  piece  of  chum  which  hides  a 
hook  is  sure  to  be  snapped  up.  When  bluefish- 
ing is  fair  in  the  Great  South  Bay  we  can  count 
upon  a  catch  of  from  twenty  to  thirty  fish, 
ranging  from  one  to  five  pounds.  But  blue- 
fishing  is  an  uncertain  sport.  I  find  from  my 
diary  that  out  of  twenty  trips  to  Fire  Island, 
eleven  produced  nothing,  except  that  each  trip 
gave  us  ten  or  twelve  hours  of  glorious  sailing. 
An  advantage  of  this  bay  for  sailing  over  any 
other  that  I  know  of,  is  that  if  rough  weather 
comes  on  the  little  craft  can  take  shelter  at  any 
of  the  many  villages  skirting  the  bay,  and  the 
fishermen  can  get  home  by  train  if  it  is  neces- 


92  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

sary.     There   is   always  a  safe   harbor   within 
twenty  minutes'  sail. 

Our  crabbing  is  enough  of  a  resource  to  be 
worth  writing  about.  After  August  it  is  at  its 
best.  Then  the  few  summer  boarders  and  cot- 
tagers who  linger  after  the  middle  of  Septem- 
ber join  with  the  native  in  hunting  the  scaven- 
ger of  these  waters,  counting  a  day  lost  which 
does  not  bring  at  least  a  score  of  big  crabs  to  an 
end,  which  I  hope  is  not  "  something  linger- 
ing." As  an  earnest  believer  in  the  value  of 
the  late  Mr.  Bergh's  work,  I  have  tried  to  find 
out  by  experiment  exactly  how  lingering  is  the 
death  by  boiling  water  to  which  the  crab's 
preference  for  stale  fish  and  other  bits  of 
kitchen  offal  finally  brings  him.  Repeated 
experiments  show  that  death  is  almost  in- 
stantaneous, if  it  is  true,  as  is  so  often  said,  that 
a  crab  lets  go  his  hold  only  when  dying.  In 
order  to  clear  one's  conscience  upon  this  matter 
it  is  necessary  to  submit  the  crab  to  what  may  be 
extremely  painful  proceedings.  Let  a  strong 
crab  get  a  good  hold  upon  a  piece  of  rope  or 
any  other  soft  material  not  too  intimately  con- 
nected with  yourself,  and  lower  himself  slowly 
into  boiling  water ;  the  crab  will  let  his  claws 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  93 

and  nearly  half  of  his  body  get  parboiled  before 
he  thinks  of  letting  go.  Instead  of  this,  begin 
by  plunging  the  crab  instantly  under,  and  the 
claws  open  at  once.  The  notion  that  it  is  more 
humane,  as  some  people  contend,  to  half  pul- 
verize the  crab  with  an  axe  before  boiling  him, 
is  the  sheerest  nonsense,  as  any  one  can  find 
out  by  experiment. 

The  last  year  has  been  an  excellent  one  for 
crabbing — a  better  catch  has  not  been  known 
since  1876.  Earlier  in  the  season,  before  the 
first  crabs  had  made  their  appearance,  an  old 
"  Cap'n  "  and  fisherman  of  this  neighborhood, 
who  is  an  expert  in  all  matters  pertaining  to 
fish,  tides,  weather,  and  profane  language,  told 
me  that  there  would  be  no  crabs  this  year.  He 
is  a  dear  old  man,  close  upon  eighty  years  of 
age,  who  is  so  full  of  gentle  humor  and  kindly 
shrewdness  that  he  can  rip  out  oath  after  oath 
without  offending  any  one.  "  He  swears  so 
gently,"  said  a  lady  of  my  acquaintance,  "  that 
it  does  n't  seem  like  real  swearing." 

"  That  'ere blizzard,"  said  the  old  fellow 

to  me  one  evening  in  June,  as  we  sat  on  some 
eel-pots  discussing  the  next  day's  weather, 
"  killed  every crab  in  the  bay,  sure.  The 


94  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

ice  hurt  'em ,  and  then  the bliz- 
zard  made   the   water  so   cold  that  the  

critters  all  died.    You  wont  see  a crab  here 

this  summer." 

But  it  seems  that  the  crab  crop  is  somewhat 
like  the  peach  crop.  The  regular  spring  an- 
nouncement to  the  effect  that  every  peach-bud 
in  the  country  has  been  nipped  by  the  frost  is 
hailed  with  joy  by  every  lover  of  peaches,  who 
then  feels  sure  that  a  fair  crop  can  be  counted 
upon.  The  blizzard  may  have  done  many 
things;  it  certainly  did  not  kill  all  the  crabs. 
It  knocked  down  the  docks  of  the  neighbor- 
hood, and  put  back  the  spring  about  a  fortnight ; 
it  did  all  sorts  of  damage  to  chimneys,  roofs, 
and  fences.  But  it  did  not  kill  the  crabs,  and  it 
gave  an  inexhaustible  topic  of  conversation  to 
the  gentry  who  gather  around  the  store-stove 
six  nights  out  of  the  seven  to  settle  the  affairs 
of  the  nation,  if  talk  can  settle  them.  If  the 
fish  did  not  bite  ;  if  the  summer  was  windy  and 
cold — which  it  was  ;  if  the  surf  was  dangerous, 
the  apple  crop  poor,  and  the  potatoes  rotten, 
the  fault  was  laid  to  the  blizzard,  that  awful 
visitation,  when,  as  the  Cap'n  says,  "  New  York 
did  n't  hear  from  us  for  more  than  a  week." 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  95 

The  crab  is  a  stupid  fellow  about  the  traps 
laid  for  him,  and  when  hungry  will  hang  to 
a  bit  of  fish  even  when  lifted  half  out  of  water. 
The  later  the  season  and  the  bigger  the  crab, 
the  more  certainty  that  no  crabs  will  escape.  I 
suppose  that  we  catch  our  crabs  in  about  the 
same  fashion  that  crabs  are  caught  everywhere ; 
tie  a  piece  of  fish  or  meat  to  a  string,  throw  it 
off  a  wharf  or  off  your  boat,  and  wait  for  a  bite. 
The  crab,  prowling  about  the  bottom,  seizes  it 
with  his  nippers,  and  begins  his  meal.  By  rais- 
ing the  bait  a  few  inches  from  the  bottom,  a 
person  can  tell,  after  small  experience,  whether 
a  crab  is  around  or  not.  If  the  crab  likes  his 
fare,  he  will  hold  on  until  he  is  drawn  well  up 
to  the  surface,  when,  with  a  deft  movement,  the 
scoop-net  is  run  under  him,  and  all  is  over  for 
that  crab.  All  kinds  of  bottoms  seem  to  suit 
him — sand,  mud,  even  eel-grass.  When  caught 
in  a  calm  and  able  to  drift  slowly  over  the  flats 
which  extend  for  a  mile  or  more  into  the  bay 
from  the  narrow  sand  strip  which  separates  us 
from  the  ocean,  one  can  catch  crabs  by  the 
dozen  if  quick  with  the  net  and  not  too  afraid 
of  falling  overboard.  The  favorite  habitat  of 
the  beast,  however,  is  the  channels  which  skirt 


96  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

the  shore,  especially  where  the  offal  from  board- 
ing houses  or  hotels  is  thrown  into  the  water.  It 
is  counted  poor  sport  when  an  afternoon's  crab- 
bing does  not  produce  thirty  or  forty  crabs. 
On  calm  days,  the  boys  often  catch  their  bas- 
ketful by  watching  the  water  along  the  sides  of 
the  docks ;  the  crabs  swim  on  the  surface  in 
search  of  the  shrimps  and  minnows  that  hide  in 
the  grass  and  sea-weeds  that  grow  upon  the 
spiles. 

The  money  value  of  the  crab,  even  here, 
where  they  can  be  caught  by  wholesale,  is 
sufficient  to  cause  many  of  the  fishermen  to 
make  a  business  of  "  shedding  "  them  in  con- 
finement. Fair  hard-shell  crabs  are  worth,  even 
upon  the  dock  here,  thirty  cents  a  dozen,  while 
for  "  shedders  "  or  soft-shells,  a  dollar  a  dozen 
is  not  considered  exorbitant.  This  high  price 
of  soft-shell  crabs  has  resulted  in  a  regular  busi- 
ness of  keeping  in  floating  boxes  or  "  cars  "  such 
crabs  as  are  about  to  shed  their  shells.  An  ex- 
pert can  tell  the  crab  that  is  going  to  shed  al- 
most without  looking  at  him.  By  dint  of  ques- 
tioning every  man  within  two  miles  of  here  who 
owns  a  car  I  think  that  I  can  tell  some  crabs 
that  are  going  to  shed.  To  the  inexperienced 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  97 

all  crabs  look  alike  ;  they  are  crawling  creatures 
with  a  surprising  grip.  Few  persons,  and  no 
women,  ever  get  near  enough  to  a  crab  to 
admire  his  superb  coloring  and  the  delicacy  of 
his  work  upon  a  piece  of  old  fish.  But  the  stu- 
dent who  has  listened  to  a  dozen  life-long  ex- 
perts and  has  tried  to  reconcile  their  wholly 
opposite  accounts  of  the  nature  of  the  animal, 
know  that  there  are  crabs  and  crabs.  Turn 
a  dozen  crabs  over  on  their  backs  and  they 
may  easily  be  divided  into  three  classes.  One 
set  will  be  perfectly  white,  with  the  "  breast- 
bone "  or  plate,  a  narrow  strip  ;  another  set, 
having  the  breastplate  expanded  so  as  almost 
to  cover  the  whole  shell  and  streaked  in  dark 
blue  and  green  ;  still  others  have  the  narrow 
breastplate,  but  the  whole  under  part  of  the 
crab  is  discolored  and  not  a  cream-white.  The 
first  class  comprise  crabs  that  have  already  shed 
this  year  and  have  grown  hard.  The  second 
class  are  the  "  pocket-books,"  as  the  fishermen 
call  them,  crabs  that  will  shed  no  more  ;  and 
the  third  class  are  those  which  may  shed  their 
shells  this  year.  For  eating,  the  crab  with  a 
cream-white  color  upon  the  underside  is  most 
esteemed.  All  the  very  large  crabs  are  likely  to 


98  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

be  "  pocket-books,"  but  some  that  I  have  eaten 
were  quite  as  good  as  any  of  the  white  fellows. 
An  expert  can  tell  by  squeezing  the  crab 
whether  the  shedding  period  is  near.  If  within 
a  few  days  of  the  time,  the  crab  is  put  into  a 
car  with  others  supposed  to  be  in  about  the 
same  condition.  It  might  be  thought  that 
soft-shelled  crabs  ought  to  be  cheap  if  they 
can  be  hatched  out  in  this  easy  fashion.  The 
trouble  is  that  eternal  vigilance  is  the  price  of 
the  soft-shell  crab.  Every  fisherman  has  to 
watch  his  crabs  night  and  day  if  he  wishes  to 
save  his  soft-shell  crabs  from  being  eaten  by  the 
other  crabs.  Until  within  five  hours  of  the 
shedding,  the  crab  retains  his  activity  and  vo- 
racity, when  he  will  fall  upon  any  thing  eat- 
able ;  then  comes  a  period  of  stupor,  and  then 
the  old  shell  is  thrown  off,  leaving  a  perfect 
crab,  one  size  larger,  but  soft  and  helpless.  If 
all  the  other  crabs  in  the  box  are  not  equally 
helpless,  the  new  soft-shell  fares  no  better  than 
in  Washington  Market.  My  friend,  the  Cap'n, 
examines  his  crabs  at  six  in  the  morning,  at 
noon,  at  six  o'clock  at  night,  and  often  again  at 
midnight,  when  he  has  a  large  number  of  "  shed- 
ders  "  on  hand.  Moreover,  a  crab  gets  hard  so 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  99 

quickly  that  for  market  purposes  he  should  be 
taken  out  of  the  car  and  packed  in  sea-weed  the 
moment  he  sheds.  In  five  hours  after  shedding, 
a  crab,  if  left  in  water,  becomes  a  "  leather- 
back  "  and  of  no  value,  comparatively  speak- 
ing. There  is  one  man  near  us  who,  with  the 
aid  of  his  two  boys,  sends  to  market  more  than 
a  hundred  "  soft-shells "  a  day  in  the  season. 
The  artificial  propagation  of  crabs  in  shallow 
salt-water  ponds  has  been  tried  here,  but  aban- 
doned, owing  to  the  regularity  with  which  the 
crabs  devour  their  young  when  they  can  catch 
them. 

Cooks  seem  to  differ  as  to  the  right  time 
which  a  crab  should  boil.  Expert  opinions 
vary  from  five  minutes  to  half  an  hour.  I  am 
inclined  to  think,  after  many  experiments,  that 
twenty  minutes  is  none  too  long,  and  that  half 
an  hour's  boiling  does  no  harm.  If  the  pail  of 
crabs  is  lifted  to  the  edge  of  the  pot  of  boiling 
water,  and  slightly  tilted,  the  crabs  will  walk  to 
their  own  death  upon  hearing  the  bubble  of  the 
water.  Thus  it  is  pleasant  to  think  that  the 
crab's  last  impressions  may  have  been  a  satis- 
faction to  him  ;  the  gurgle  of  water  is  in  his 
ears  as  he  takes  the  plunge,  and  before  he  dis- 


IOO  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

covers  that  he  is  not  in  the  Great  South  Bay 
all  things  are  indifferent  to  him.  The  change 
of  color  from  dark-green  and  blue  to  cardinal- 
red  takes  place  the  moment  after  the  crab  is  in 
boiling  water,  and  is  no  indication  that  he  is 
cooked.  Those  persons  who  know  the  cooked 
crab  only  have  no  conception  of  the  superb 
coloring  in  green,  turquoise-blue,  and  ivory- 
white  which  makes  a  live  crab  a  thing  of 
beauty.  Crabs  in  market  are  so  often  cooked 
in  order  to  keep  them  the  better,  that  it  is  no 
wonder  some  people  imagine  that  the  crab  goes 
through  life  in  a  scarlet  coat.  I  saw  last  winter 
a  game  picture  which  had,  among  other  things, 
a  bright-red  crab  crawling  off  the  dish. 

A  friend  of  mine  insists  that  in  order  to  eat 
a  crab  with  any  comfort  it  is  necessary  to  have 
at  hand,  besides  the  crab,  a  bowie-knife,  a 
hammer,  and  a  bucket  of  water.  Others, 
equally  ignorant,  insist  that  there  is  nothing  to 
eat  in  a  crab.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  opening 
of  a  crab  can  be  made  a  pleasure,  and  there  is 
really  a  great  deal  of  delicious  eating  to  be 
found.  To  begin  with,  the  outfit  for  crab- 
eating  should  consist  of  nut-picks,  nut-crackers, 
finger-bowls,  and  napkins.  The  big  claws  are 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  IOI 

easily  broken  open  with  the  nut-crackers.  The 
legs  can  be  thrown  away  in  times  of  plenty 
To  get  at  the  inside  of  a  crab  with  neatness 
and  despatch,  turn  up  the  under  breastplate 
and  break  it  off.  Then  the  whole  back  can  be 
lifted  off,  exposing  a  good  deal  of  a  yellow, 
greenish  substance,  which  is  the  fat  of  the 
crab  and  its  best  relish.  Having  the  crab  di- 
vested of  underplate  and  back-shell,  break  it  in 
two,  and  the  white  meat  will  be  readily  ex- 
tracted with  a  nut-pick.  The  muscles  which 
operate  the  crab's  claws  and  legs  constitute  the 
meat.  A  little  practice  will  convince  any  one 
that  crabs  are  not  to  be  despised.  Their  flavor 
is  incomparably  finer  than  that  of  a  lobster, 
while  the  scientific  opening  of  a  crab  has  all 
the  charm  of  a  surgical  operation. 

To  those  who  contend  that  crabs  are  deadly 
poison,  especially  if  eaten  after  dark,  I  can 
only  say  that  I  have  experimented  upon  my- 
self and  upon  a  number  of  other  people's 
children  without  unpleasant  results.  A  crab 
(cooked)  is  one  of  the  favorite  playthings  of 
babies  in  this  neighborhood.  It  is  said  that 
milk  and  crabs,  when  taken  together,  raise  a 
tempest  inside  of  one.  Again  I  may  say  that  I 


102  LIBERT?  AND  A   LIVING. 

have  experimented  and  escaped.  The  proba- 
bility is,  that  people  who  eat  crabs  with  vinegar 
and  other  rich  sauces  ought  not  to  drink  milk 
at  the  same  time. 

How  to  handle  a  crab  is  a  subject  better 
taught  by  actual  experience  than  by  directions. 
It  is  not  so  difficult  a  matter  as  most  people 
suppose,  and  the  ladies  who  would  no  sooner 
meet  a  crab  than  some  terrible  beast  of  prey — 
say  a  mouse — are  all  wrong.  I  have  known  a 
whole  earful  of  people  utterly  demoralized  by 
a  few  poor  timid  little  crabs.  During  the  sum- 
mer some  friends  who  went  crabbing  with  me 
one  day  wanted  to  take  a  few  fine  specimens  to 
New  York.  I  packed  them  carefully  in  a  bas- 
ket, with  sea-weed  below  and  on  top,  and  over 
all  I  tied  a  newspaper.  It  was  dark  when  my 
friend  and  his  wife  reached  the  railway.  He 
put  the  basket  under  the  seat  in  the  car  and 
went  to  sleep.  Just  as  he  was  dreaming  that 
he  had  landed  a  crab  as  big  as  a  porpoise,  his 
wife  awoke  him  with  a  tragic  whisper  :  "  Harry, 
the  crabs  are  out — one  has  just  walked  over  my 
foot ! " 

The  situation  was  a  critical  one.  The  wet 
sea-weed  had  weakened  the  paper  covering  of 


WITH  FISH-LINES  AND  NETS.  1 03 

the  basket,  and  the  crabs  were  coming  forth  in 
a  solemn  procession  ;  by  the  looks  of  the  bas- 
ket, at  least  twenty  must  have  gone — some- 
where. My  friend  jammed  a  heavy  shawl  into 
the  basket  over  what  remained,  and  awaited 
developments  in  fear  and  trembling.  They 
were  not  long  in  coming.  A  shriek  from  a 
lady  at  the  other  end  of  the  car  announced 
that  one  crab  had  made  his  presence  felt.  All 
was  excitement  in  a  moment.  "  She  's  got 
heart  disease,"  said  one  old  gentleman  ;  "  stop 
the  train  and  get  a  doctor."  "  Catch  it,  catch 
it,  it  's  under  my  seat,  it  's  bitten  my  foot ! " 
cried  the  poor  woman.  My  friend  had  to  do 
something.  "  Ladies  and  gentlemen,"  he 
shouted,  "  it  's  all  right.  A  few  little  crabs 
that  I  had  in  a  basket  have  escaped — that  's 
all."  That  was  all,  was  it?  Every  woman  in 
the  car  jumped  shrieking  upon  the  seats,  and 
quiet  was  restored  only  when  the  last  crab  had 
been  kicked  off  the  rear  platform  by  the  brake- 
man. 

If  taken  properly,  the  crab  is  the  most  harm- 
less of  dangerous  beasts.  Bear  in  mind  that  if 
you  take  a  crab  firmly  where  the  hind  legs  joins 
his  body,  he  cannot  get  at  you  with  his  nip- 


IO4  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

pers ;  also,  that  any  quick  motion  disconcerts 
the  crab  for  the  moment,  and  you  will  be  mas- 
ter of  the  situation.  By  a  little  experimenting 
you  will  find  the  exact  place  where  a  crab  may 
safely  be  seized,  and  possibly  some  places  where 
it  is  not  safe.  Rapid  passes  before  the  eyes 
of  a  crab  appear  to  paralyze  him.  If,  there- 
fore, you  quickly  turn  him  over  and  over  until 
you  see  an  opportunity  of  seizing  him  by  the 
hind  leg  close  to  the  body,  there  is  not  one 
chance  in  five  that  the  crab  will  get  hold  of 
you  before  you  get  hold  of  him.  After  all, 
suppose  he  does  get  a  nip  now  and  then  ? — his 
revenge  for  ill-treatment  is  insignificant  com- 
pared with  what  yours  will  be. 


WE  GO  A-FISHING. 

A  T  daylight  all  was  bustle  and  preparation 
**•  for  a  fishing  trip  to  Fire  Island  ;  one 
would  think  from  the  excitement  of  the  chil- 
dren that  we  went  fishing  but  once  a  year  in- 
stead of  once  a  week,  and  that  the  prospect  of 
catching  a  fish  was  something  altogether  un- 
usual. I  do  not  remember  a  more  perfect 
morning.  When  Arthur  and  I  started  down 
to  the  boat  to  see  that  all  was  ready,  an  iri- 
descent mist  hung  over  the  bay,  and  the  distant 
highlands  down  toward  Fire  Island  were  tipped 
with  fire.  The  air  was  cool  enough  to  make 
one  relish  the  idea  that  the  sun  would  be  warm 
in  a  few  hours,  and  there  was  enough  promise 
of  a  breeze  to  warrant  a  start  as  soon  as  break- 
fast had  been  disposed  of.  It  was  a  pleasure 
even  to  jump  aboard  the  Nelly  and  get  her 
ready  for  her  thirty-mile  trip.  The  man  who 
does  not  love  the  water  and  a  boat  can  scarcely 
understand  such  joy  as  this  ;  but  to  me  and  to 
105 


106  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

some  people  I  know,  a  boat,  and  especially  a 
sail-boat,  is  a  never-failing  source  of  pleasure. 
The  fact  that  I  have  seen  some  pretty  rough 
days  in  the  Nelly,  and  that  there  have  been 
times  when  I  would  not  have  wagered  much 
upon  my  chances  of  getting  her  into  port,  seem 
rather  to  endear  her  to  us  ;  a  boat  that  has 
stood  a  hundred  gales,  and  has  carried  us 
thousands  of  miles,  deserves  something  of 
gratitude  in  return.  I  cherish  on  the  desk 
at  which  I  now  write  a  brass  cleat  from  a  little 
sail-boat  I  once  owned  ;  it  serves  as  a  paper- 
weight and  as  a  reminder  of  scores  of  pleasure 
days.  On  one  side  of  it  is  engraved  the  name 
of  the  boat,  and  on  the  other  the  date — "April- 
December,  1880."  When  the  time  came  for 
selling  her,  I  retained  this  memento  of  many 
an  exciting  sail,  and,  as  my  wife  would  add,  of 
many  a  hairbreadth  escape. 

We  hoisted  the  Nelly  s  sail  to  dry  in  the  sun, 
and  started  back  to  breakfast.  There  were  but 
few  of  the  natives  about  the  shore,  but  among 
those  few  I  found  my  friend  the  Cap'n,  who 
had  been  out  to  his  nets,  and  had  brought  back 
a  plentiful  supply  of  "  bunkers,"  which  we  could 
have  as  bait.  These  "  bunkers  "  are  the  "  bony. 


WE  GO  A- FISHING.  IO? 

fish,"  or  the  menhaden  of  the  oil  factories ; 
when  our  bay  fishermen  take  them  in  their  nets, 
they  are  not  thrown  back,  but  are  used  as  ma- 
nure. As  the  Cap'n  says,  every  "  bunker " 
represents  a  good-sized  potato  to  him.  For  a 
few  cents  we  get  a  bucketful  of  them  for  bait. 
It  is  six  o'clock  by  the  time  we  get  back  to  the 
house,  to  find  the  breakfast  steaming  on  the 
table.  Half  an  hour  later  we  are  off  to  the 
shore  again,  and  before  seven  o'clock  the  Nelly 
is  bowling  along  westward  at  the  rate  of  five 
miles  an  hour.  The  village  is  still,  to  all  in- 
tents and  purposes,  asleep,  although  the  sun 
has  begun  to  melt  the  mists,  and  the  air  has 
lost  the  keen  sharpness  of  an  hour  before.  As 
we  glide  along,  all  to  the  south  of  us,  over  tow- 
ards the  ocean,  is  one  flood  of  golden  light,  with 
the  low  ridge  of  the  sand  hills  standing  out  in 
shadow  ;  above  these  lines  of  sand  dunes  the 
morning  sky  is  resplendent,  and  between  us 
and  the  beach  the  bay  glitters  with  dancing 
sunbeams.  On  the  other  side  we  have  the 
Long  Island  shore,  with  its  hills  and  woods,  its 
farmhouses  and  hay-stacks.  From  our  point  of 
view,  about  a  mile  out  in  the  bay,  we  can  see 
the  spires  of  half-a-dozen  villages — Bellport, 


108  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

Patchogue,  Bayport,  and  Sayville  among  them. 
The  prevalent  idea  to  the  effect  that  Long 
Island  is  a  flat  stretch  of  sand,  is  one  of  the 
first  impressions  to  disappear  when  one  gets  out 
upon  the  water  here.  There  are  no  mountains, 
to  be  sure,  but  we  have  respectable  hills,  and 
when  seen  from  the  water  in  certain  lights  they 
give  a  mountainous  background  to  the  country 
along  the  shore.  To  get  the  full  effect  of  these 
Long  Island  hills  as  an  imposing  background, 
one  has  to  sail  from  the  Great  South  Bay  down 
to  Moriches  on  just  such  a  morning  as  this. 
Starting  from  Patchogue  at  five  or  even  at  six 
o'clock,  if  the  wind  is  fair,  the  entrance  to  the 
narrow  strait  at  Smith's  Point  is  reached  before 
the  mists  rise,  and  one  gets  a  view  of  Moriches, 
which  has  reminded  more  than  one  person  I 
know  of  a  miniature  Swiss  landscape.  The 
little  village  seems  to  nestle  at  the  foot  of  a 
range  of  mountains,  more  or  less  imposing, 
according  to  the  power  of  the  sun  upon  the 
mists.  Sailing  out  of  Patchogue,  we  could  not 
imagine  ourselves  upon  a  Swiss  lake,  for  the 
hills  in  the  background  were  too  far  off  to 
dominate  the  town  ;  moreover,  the  air  was  bet- 
ter than  ever  blew  over  Lake  Geneva. 


WE   GO  A-FISHING.  1 09 

A  fishing  expedition  to  us  who  live  nearly  at 
the  other  end  of  the  Great  South  Bay,  means  a 
•day's  trip,  as  a  rule,  and  as  usual  we  get  fairly 
off  before  we  begin  to  take  stock  of  the  neces- 
saries that  have  been  left  behind.  It  is  a 
twelve-mile  sail  to  the  cinder-beds,  as  our  fish- 
ing grounds  are  called,  and  as  we  are  pretty 
sure  to  have  to  beat  against  the  wind  one  way, 
it  is  called  a  thirty-mile  sail  there  and  back. 
There  are  five  of  us  in  the  boat,  not  counting 
the  children,  and  to  two  of  our  friends  the  trip 
is  a  novel  one  in  every  respect  ;  they  had 
never  been  on  the  bay  before,  they  had  never 
seen  a  bluefish  caught,  and  they  had  serious 
doubts  as  to  whether  a  day  on  the  water  might 
not  end  in  disaster.  One  of  the  ladies  had 
braved  the  terrors  of  a  thirty-mile  sail,  notwith- 
standing the  fact  that  when  she  went  last  to 
Europe  she  was  so  sea-sick  that  "  every  thing 
came  out  of  her  except  her  immortal  soul." 
Sailing  on  our  bay  is  somewhat  dangerous  to 
sea-sick  people,  because  it  is  so  shallow  that  a 
breeze  makes  a  sea  in  less  time  than  it  takes  to 
tell  it ;  because  the  water  is  like  a  mill-pond  in 
the  morning  is  no  promise  that  it  may  not  be 
like  the  "  raging  main  "  by  afternoon.  Es- 


110  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

pecially  is  this  the  case  when  the  wind  is  from 
the  north.  I  have  recorded  the  results  of  a 
"norther"  often  enough  to  feel  certain  as  to 
the  day's  weather  on  this  water ;  when  the 
water  is  smooth,  and  the  north  breeze  comes 
in  the  morning  like  a  zephyr,  look  out  for  a 
squally  gale  by  noon — one  of  the  worst  winds 
we  have  for  small  boats.  It  will  blow  in  gusts 
all  day  until  the  sun  sinks,  when  it  will  die 
away,  and  the  day  will  end  as  it  began. 

As  we  sailed  along  I  gave  our  friends  some 
details  as  to  the  life  upon  the  Great  South  Bay, 
its  pleasures  and  its  hardships,  which  may  be 
resumed  in  a  few  pages  and  may  possibly  inter- 
est people  who  know  little  about  this  part  of 
the  coast  and  its  sports.  As  between  a  life  along 
the  coast  and  a  life  in  the  hills,  I  have  found  by 
experience — my  own  and  that  of  others — that 
success  depends  largely  upon  temperament  and 
constitution.  There  are  people  who  cannot 
stand  salt  air,  much  as  they  love  it  ;  and  I  have 
known  earnest  lovers  of  the  sea  and  the  coast 
to  suffer  such  agonies  from  throat  and  lung 
troubles  when  living  near  the  ocean,  that  no 
amount  of  pleasure  to  be  derived  from  water 
sports  could  atone  for  these  drawbacks.  Every 


WE   GO  A-FISHING.  Ill 

man  should  make  a  certain  number  of  experi- 
ments in  determining  what  part  of  the  world, 
within  certain  limits,  is  best  suited  to  his  needs 
and  purposes.  People  are  too  prone  to  settle 
down  meekly  wherever  the  Fates  cast  them. 
There  comes  a  time  in  life  when  almost  every 
man  can  (perhaps  by  a  little  sacrifice)  cut  loose 
from  money-making  work  of  a  routine  character 
and  take  some  sort  of  what  I  should  call  ra- 
tional employment  in  the  open  air,  whether  it 
be  fishing,  gardening,  or  hunting.  When  such 
a  time  comes,  why  should  not  the  man  who 
determines  upon  so  important  a  change,  look 
over  the  whole  field  ?  We  have  almost  all  con- 
ditions of  climate  and  soil  within  a  few  days  of 
us.  I  have  known  busy  New-Yorkers  to  cut 
loose  from  the  bank  or  the  business  desk,  and 
adopt  life  down  on  the  Cheseapeake  Bay ; 
others  have  taken  to  raising  oranges  in  Florida ; 
some  of  my  own  relatives  have  been  for  years 
engaged  in  vineyards  and  wine-making  in  Cali- 
fornia ;  others,  again,  have  taken  to  small 
fruits ;  still  others  have  embarked  in  sheep- 
raising  in  northern  Connecticut,  and  made  it 
pay.  I  myself,  perhaps  from  timidity,  have  set- 
tled down  within  a  few  miles  of  New  York,  for 


112  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

I  find  a  good  deal  in  favor  of  this  sheet  of  water 
which  constitutes  our  happy  hunting-ground. 

The  common  idea  that  the  Long  Island  coast 
is  simply  one  long  stretch  of  sand,  varied  by 
occasional  patches  of  green  in  the  shape  of  salt 
meadows,  called  marshes  by  city  visitors,  may 
be  true  so  far  as  concerns  the  country  within 
forty  miles  of  New  York.  But  beyond  that 
there  is  a  decided  change.  There  are  actually 
hills  to  be  seen  here  and  there ;  not  very  high 
ones,  but  high  enough  to  be  called  hills.  Most 
persons  who  have  noticed  on  the  maps  the 
words  "  Shinnecock  Hills,"  wonder  what  kind 
of  country  this  may  be,  for  at  the  point  where 
the  Shinnecock  reservation  is  situated,  Long 
Island  is  but  a  mere  neck  of  land,  at  one  point 
not  more  than  a  few  hundred  rods  wide.  The 
Shinnecock  Indians  at  one  time  occupied  this 
part  of  the  island,  and  their  descendants  are 
still  to  be  found.  Along  the  coast,  starting 
from  a  point  forty  miles  from  New  York,  there 
are  hills  to  be  seen  even  far  more  imposing 
than  the  famous  Shinnecock  range,  which  is  in 
reality  merely  a  collection  of  sand  dunes,  scant- 
ily covered  with  grass  upon  which  sheep  are 
pastured.  The  central  range  of  hills,  or  the 


WE   GO  A-FISHING.  113 

back-bone  of  the  island,  is  quite  an  imposing 
line  when  seen  from  the  ocean,  and  even  as 
viewed  from  the  Great  South  Bay  upon  a  misty 
morning  it  gives,  as  I  have  already  said,  quite 
an  air  of  mountainous  wilderness  to  the  back- 
ground. In  former  days,  when  the  Great  South 
Bay  and  Shinnecock  Bay  were  deep  enough  to 
afford  navigation  for  good-sized  schooners,  it 
is  probable  that  all  this  region  stretching 
between  Islip  on  the  west  and  East  Hampton 
on  the  east,  was  the  scene  of  much  more  ani- 
mation the  year  round  than  at  present.  We 
who  resort  here  for  quiet  are  rather  glad  of  the 
change.  Old  ocean  has  helped  us.  It  has 
played  such  tricks  with  this  coast  that  it  seems 
to  be  only  a  matter  of  time  when  these  bays 
will  become  wholly  land-locked.  Fifty  years 
ago  there  was  a  large  outlet  to  the  ocean  in  the 
Great  South  Bay  nearly  opposite  Patchogue, 
whereas  now  the  boats  have  to  go  twenty  miles 
farther  down  the  bay  to  Fire  Island  inlet  before 
they  can  go  out  into  the  ocean.  Year  after 
year,  this  Patchogue  inlet  grew  narrower  as 
each  great  storm  washed  up  thousands  of  tons 
of  sand.  At  last  a  great  storm  closed  up  the 
inlet,  and  it  was  only  when  the  people  went  to 


114  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

work  with  shovels  and  carts  that  any  communi- 
cation between  the  bay  and  the  ocean  was 
maintained.  For  several  years  there  was  a 
day  appointed,  usually  in  the  spring,  when  the 
farmers  and  fishermen  within  ten  miles  of 
Patchogue  and  Bellport  were  called  upon  to 
meet  at  the  inlet  and  put  in  a  day's  work  at 
Digging.  If  the  response  to  the  call  was  a 
satisfactory  one,  the  work  of  clearing  out  the 
channel  to  a  depth  of  four  or  five  feet  right 
across  the  sand-bar  took  but  a  few  hours ; 
then,  if  there  came  up  no  great  storm,  such  an 
inlet  would  last  all  summer,  giving  plenty  of 
salt  water  to  the  bay.  In  the  autumn  the  first 
great  storms  of  winter  filled  up  the  inlet,  and 
in  the  spring  the  work  had  to  be  done  all  over 
again.  About  twenty-five  years  ago  it  became 
evident  that  the  ocean  was  a  far  better  work- 
man than  the  people  of  Patchogue,  and  was 
making  it  more  and  more  difficult  to  keep  up 
communication  with  the  bay.  As  no  vessels 
of  any  size  could  sail  through  this  artificial 
ditch,  the  only  use  for  it  was  to  give  salt  water 
to  the  bay,  and  this  benefited  only  the  fisher- 
men. So  the  farmers  objected  to  working  for 
this  purpose,  and  the  inlet  was  allowed  to 


WE  GO  A-F1SHING.  115 

become  so  choked  up  that  to-day  it  would  cost 
thousands  of  dollars  and  months  of  labor  to  cut 
an  opening  at  the  place  where  half  a  century 
ago  vessels  sailed  through. 

In  Shinnecock  Bay,  twenty-five  miles  farther 
along,  exactly  the  same  experience  has  been 
gone  through  within  the  last  ten  years ;  but 
the  people  of  that  neighborhood  still  keep  up 
courage,  and  work  at  the  inlet  every  spring, 
with  the  hope  that  nature  will  some  day  come 
to  their  assistance  and  restore  the  old  channels. 
The  canal,  which  the  government  is  now  cutting 
through  the  neck  of  land  separating  Shinnecock 
and  Peconic  bays,  may  create  a  current  ocean- 
ward  which  will  carry  the  sand  out  to  sea.  The 
reason  for  this  greater  activity  upon  the  part  of 
the  Shinnecock  people  is  that  without  commu- 
nication with  the  ocean,  Shinnecock  Bay  would 
soon  become  a  fresh-water  and  a  very  unhealthy 
pond.  Even  now  it  is  impossible  to  grow  clams 
in  Shinnecock  Bay,  once  the  best  clamming 
spot  along  the  coast,  because  the  water  is  not 
salt  enough,  and  if  the  canal  does  not  help 
matters,  the  time  is  not  far  distant  when,  not- 
withstanding the  yearly  cleaning-out  of  the 
inlet,  all  fish  and  oysters  will  disappear. 


Il6  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

At  the  upper  end  of  the  Great  South  Bay 
the  effect  of  filling  up  the  inlets  communicating 
with  the  ocean  has  been  felt  chiefly  by  the 
fishermen.  As  there  is  no  communication  with 
the  ocean,  no  sand  of  any  consequence  is  thrown 
into  the  bay  by  winter  storms.  For  the  last 
twenty-five  years  the  bottom  of  the  Great 
South  Bay  has  undergone  no  changes,  and  the 
soundings  made  by  the  government  many  years 
ago  are  still  trustworthy.  In  the  great  storms 
of  winter  the  spray  of  the  ocean  sometimes 
washes  into  the  bay,  rolling  over  the  sand-bar, 
but  the  agitation  of  the  water  in  the  bay  is  not 
sufficient  to  cause  the  sand  to  shift.  We  have 
still  a  depth  of  from  four  to  seven  feet  right  up 
to  the  end  of  the  bay,  with  long  stretches  of 
shallow  flats,  sometimes  covered  with  grass,  in 
which  the  ducks  take  shelter  and  feed  in  win- 
ter. These  flats  extend  along  the  sand-bar 
from  one  to  two  miles  into  the  bay,  and  any 
one  who  has  sailed  for  a  summer  or  two  in  the 
bay,  learns  pretty  well  how  to  keep  clear  of 
them  by  the  .looks  of  the  water.  Along  the 
main  shore  there  is  plenty  of  water  for  from 
two  to  three  miles  out  from  the  shore,  and  this 
makes  the  bay  a  superb  sailing-place  for  small 


WE   GO  A-FI SUING.  1 1/ 

boats.  As  for  the  fishing  part,  it  has  grown 
less  and  less,  until  to-day  it  is  not  what  might 
be  called  a  good  fishing-ground,  except  within 
a  few  miles  of  Fire  Island  inlet,  where  the  blue- 
fish  still  run  in  the  right  season.  Perhaps  the 
number  of  fishermen  has  had  something  to  do 
with  the  scarcity  of  fish.  The  fame  of  Fire 
Island  inlet  has  spread  so  far  among  lovers  of 
bluefish  that  not  a  day  passes  from  late  June 
until  late  September  when  there  cannot  be 
found  a  fleet  of  from  twenty  to  two  hundred 
boats  on  the  look-out  for  bluefish.  The 
fishing  industry  of  Babylon  is  entirely  de- 
voted to  taking  out  parties  for  bluefishing; 
the  professional  fisherman  scarcely  professes  to 
fish  at  all.  His  duty  is  to  keep  his  smack  in 
order,  to  furnish  bait  and  lines,  and  to  be  ready 
to  pilot  his  patrons  to  the  best  place  in  the  bay 
for  a  catch.  Whether  fish  are  caught  or  not, 
the  fisherman  gets  his  dollars,  and  finds  it  more 
profitable  to  take  people  fishing  than  to  fish 
himself. 

Oysters,  of  course,  have  remained  one  of  the 
great  resources  of  the  Great  South  Bay.  The  fa- 
mous Blue  Point,  so  named  because  of  the  blue 
tint  of  the  weeds  which  formerly  covered  the 


Il8  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

point,  still  remains  the  ideal  spot  of  this  region 
for  oyster-dredging,  and  when  the  summer  vis- 
itor runs  away  frightened  by  the  first  Septem- 
ber storm,  the  oysterman  takes  off  the  fancy 
trimmings  of  his  boat,  stores  away  the  awn- 
ings, camp  chairs,  and  cushions,  and  prepares 
for  hard  work.  In  reality,  the  first  two  months 
of  oystering  are  what  is  to  me  the  pleasantest 
time  of  the  year.  Once  the  September  gales 
have  abated,  the  weather  settles  down  into  glo- 
rious days,  and  from  early  October  until  Christ- 
mas the  Blue  Point  oysterer  has  an  existence 
which  might  be  envied  by  any  one  fond  of  out- 
door exercise.  On  such  days  as  these,  the  bay, 
calm  and  peaceful,  is  given  up  to  its  rightful 
owners.  The  summer  visitors  have  disap- 
peared. The  smacks  of  the  fishermen  have 
resumed  their  working  appearance,  the  duck- 
shooters  have  begun  to  sound  the  alarm  along 
the  coast,  and  from  sunrise  to  sunset,  the  air, 
whether  it  comes  from  the  ocean  or  from  the 
pine  woods  of  the  Long  Island  plains,  is  full  of 
a  fragrance  which  cannot  be  found  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  great  cities.  People  talk  about  the 
sufferings  of  the  oystermen,  and  we  hear  a 
good  deal  about  frozen  hands,  night  work,  and 


WE   GO  A-FISHING.  119 

perilous  adventures.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  al- 
though I  have  followed  the  doings  of  the  bay 
oystermen  with  considerable  interest,  I  have 
found  no  evidences  of  exceptional  hardship. 
It  is  cold  work  sometimes,  but  as  compared  to 
the  work  of  a  city  car-driver  it  is  sport.  Al- 
though each  oyster  smack  has  a  comfortable 
little  cabin  warmed  by  a  stove,  it  is  a  common 
sight  to  see  the  oystermen  eating  their  dinners 
in  the  sunlight  on  deck  rather  than  keep  to  the 
cabin  on  a  blustering  December  day.  The 
worst  that  can  be  said  of  the  life  of  the  profes- 
sional oysterman  is  that  it  does  not  pay,  and 
even  this  may  be  called  in  question.  The  crew 
of  a  smack  devoted  to  fishing  in  the  bay, 
whether  for  bony  fish  for  the  oil  factories,  or 
for  oysters,  usually  consists  of  two  men  and  a 
boy  ;  the  boy  sails  the  boat,  while  the  men  at- 
tend to  the  nets  or  the  dredges.  The  smack  is 
worth  from  $600  to  $1,200,  according  to  size 
and  appointment.  I  have  known  the  profits  of 
a  season,  which  begins  in  June  and  ends  when 
the  bay  freezes  over  in  January,  to  be  $2,500 
for  one  smack.  The  fishing  lasts  till  October, 
when  the  oystering  begins.  The  boats  are 
usually  owned  by  the  men  who  sail  them,  and 


120  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

the  boy  who  goes  as  sailor  gets  a  percentage  of 
the  catch,  whether  of  fish  or  of  oysters.  One 
young  fellow  who  sailed  in  a  Patchogue  smack 
last  summer  got  $600  as  the  returns  of  his  sum- 
mer's work. 

To-day,  as  the  morning  breeze  dies  away 
about  ten  o'clock,  leaving  us  in  the  middle  of 
the  bay,  two  miles  from  land  on  either  side,  it 
seems  hard  to  believe  that  within  a  few  weeks 
the  oystermen  will  be  blowing  on  their  fingers 
and  swinging  their  arms,  and  that  the  duck- 
shooters  will  be  ranging  this  very  spot.  The 
water  is  so  warm  that  it  is  still  full  of  jelly-fish, 
which  the  children  catch  with  a  scalp  net  as  we 
glide  slowly  along.  Half  an  hour  later  the 
breeze  dies  out  entirely,  and  the  boom  swings 
from  one  side  to  the  other,  the  sail  flapping 
idly.  No  amount  of  whistling  brings  a  breeze. 
It  is  hot  and  still.  The  buzzing  of  an  occa- 
sional fly  and  noises  from  the  distant  shore  are 
faintly  heard  ;  the  barking  of  dogs  and  the 
hammering  of  some  carpenters  are  very  dis- 
tinct. As  the  little  air  moving  comes  from  the 
shore,  we  cannot  hear  the  boom  of  the  surf  on 
the  other  side  of  us.  The  cinder  beds,  our 
fishing  grounds,  are  still  five  miles  away.  By 


WE   GO  A-FISHING.  121 

watching  the  bottom,  a  few  feet  below  us,  we 
estimate  that  the  boat  is  moving  at  the  rate  of 
one  yard  a  minute,  at  which  pace  we  shall  get 
there  some  time  next  year.  This  is  part  of  fish- 
erman's luck,  and  the  man  who  should  feel  re- 
sentment or  show  impatience  in  such  circum- 
stances has  no  business  to  go  fishing  on  the 
Great  South  Bay,  or  anywhere  else.  We  have 
books  with  us,  we  have  hopes  of  a  breeze  to 
come  and  fish  to  be  caught. 

The  true  fisherman  enjoys  fishing  whether  he 
catches  fish  or  not.  The  love  of  fishing  is 
much  akin  to  the  love  of  gambling  ;  whether 
you  win  or  lose  there  is  pleasurable  excitement 
about  it.  It  is  the  hope  of  getting  something 
for  nothing,  so  to  speak,  and  your  true  fisher- 
man will  sit  upon  the  edge  of  a  boat  or  the 
string-piece  of  a  wharf  all  day,  content  to  be 
there  and  meditate  upon  what  he  might  have 
caught  or  may  yet  catch.  The  best  fisherman 
I  know  are  the  old  fellows  who  dangle  their 
legs  over  the  edge  of  the  Paris  quays  waiting 
for  goujons  to  bite — little  fish  half  the  size  of 
a  herring ;  and  the  catch  of  a  round  half-dozen 
makes  a  red-letter  day  for  the  Seine  fishermen. 
I  remember  a  picture  of  two  of  these  enthusi- 


122  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING, 

asts  going  home  in  a  pelting  rain  with  an 
empty  creel  between  them.  They  have  been 
out  all  day  and  are  drenched  to  the  skin.  One 
says  :  "  What  a  glorious  sport  this  fishing  is  ! 
What  would  life  be  without  it  ? "  "  Yes,  in- 
deed," responds  the  other,  "  I  shall  never  forget 
that  nibble  as  long  as  I  live  !  "  This  is  the  true 
spirit  in  which  to  fish. 

I  was  pretty  sure  that  upon  so  clear  and 
cloudless  a  day  there  would  be  wind  after  the 
sun  passed  the  meridian,  and,  sure  enough,  the 
breeze  began  to  come  clear  and  cold  from  the 
ocean  before  one  o'clock.  It  was  a  good  breeze 
to  take  us  home,  and  so  we  determined  to  push 
on  for  a  few  miles  more  for  the  sake  of  trying 
the  bluefish  on  the  cinder  beds.  The  enjoyment 
and  refreshment  of  a  cold  wind  after  the  sultry 
stagnation  under  a  hot  sun  was  reward  enough 
for  our  previous  discomfort,  and  the  spirits  of 
the  party  rose  as  the  boom  swung  over  to  star- 
board and  we  started  again  for  Fire  Island, 
headed  down  the  bay.  Luncheon  was  got  out, 
and  we  munched  our  sandwiches  and  prepared 
the  tackle  for  fishing. 

With  the  breeze  a  haze  also  spread  over  the 
horizon.  South  of  us  we  had  the  Fire  Island 


W 'E   GO  A-FISH1NG.  123 

coast,  which  is  here  splendidly  wooded  with 
scrub  oak  and  is  dotted  at  long  intervals  with 
the  summer-houses  of  people  who  care  less  for 
society  than  for  nature.  We  were  sailing  within 
half  a  mile  of  the  island.  Back  of  us  Patchogue 
was  lost  in  the  mist.  The  breeze  grew  fresher 
and  fresher.  The  waves  began  to  rise,  and  it 
was  as  lively  sailing  as  any  one  could  want  when 
we  reached  the  little  fleet  of  fishing-boats  lying 
on  the  cinder  beds  and  cast  out  our  anchor. 
We  were  late  for  the  right  tide,  but  as  the 
crews  of  the  other  boats  reported  the  fishing  to 
be  fair,  we  decided  to  try  it.  With  such  a 
breeze  it  would  be  less  than  a  two  hours'  sail 
home,  and  it  was  not  yet  two  o'clock.  We 
should  have  time  for  an  hour's  fishing,  for  half 
an  hour's  run  on  shore  in  order  to  rest  the 
children,  and  then  we  could  make  sail  for  home 
with  a  fresh  wind  at  our  stern  for  a  ten  miles' 
run. 

The  routine  of  our  bluefishing  I  have  de- 
scribed elsewhere.  Fish  are  a  secondary  con- 
sideration. If  we  catch  any,  well  and  good  ;  if 
not,  we  have  had  a  pretext  for  sailing  thirty 
miles  and  idling  away  the  day  in  the  most 
profitable  way  imaginable.  "  L'Art  de  ne  Rien 


124  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

Faire  "  is  after  all  one  of  the  most  difficult  of 
arts.  Nature  and  the  animals  flourish  in  idle- 
ness. But  man  is  supposed  to  deteriorate  when 
not  engaged  in  producing  things,  or  robbing  his 
neighbors  in  the  finesses  of  trade.  If,  because 
of  the  vicious  warp  inherited  from  ancestors 
who  deified  work  for  its  own  sake,  we  feel  un- 
comfortable at  the  idea  that  we  are  sailing  the 
Great  South  Bay  from  morning  till  night  with 
no  dollars  in  view,  we  may  perhaps  quiet  our 
utilitarian  instincts  by  this  pretext  of  fishing. 
We  are  trying  to  obtain  food  for  the  family ; 
we  may  not  have  hoed  any  corn  or  dug  any 
potatoes,  or  written  any  articles  which  editors 
may  be  willing  to  pay  for,  but  we  have  tried  to 
provide  food  for  the  household,  and  our  con- 
science is  clear.  It  may  be  said  that  this  is  but 
a  subterfuge,  for  if  I  had  stayed  at  my  desk 
cudgelling  my  brains  for  ideas  of  merchantable 
value,  I  should  have  earned  enough  money  to 
buy  bluefish  for  the  whole  summer.  This  may 
be  true,  and  yet  I  do  not  admit  the  force  of 
any  such  reasoning.  The  mere  ability  to  earn 
enough  money  to  keep  one's  family  decently 
sheltered,  fed,  and  clothed  is  the  most  ordinary 
ability  in  the  world  ;  the  man  who  fails  to  do  it 


WE  GO  A-FISHING.  12$ 

is  either  extremely  unfortunate  or  uncommonly 
incompetent.  He  is  the  exception.  We  should 
aim  to  accomplish  something  more  than  what 
every  one  does.  We  should  endeavor  to  eat 
our  cake  and  keep  it  too.  I  am  led  to  say  all 
this  in  order  to  explain  why  it  was  that  we  did 
not  give  way  to  dejection  when  we  discovered, 
after  a  throw  or  two  of  the  lines,  that  the  tide 
had  turned  and  that  there  were  no  fish  to  be 
had.  The  other  boats  had  begun  to  raise  their 
anchors  and  were  taking  advantage  of  the  fine 
southwesterly  breeze  to  spread  their  wings  for 
home.  It  was  a  question  whether  the  wind 
would  last  until  sundown  or  not.  So  the  fish- 
ing was  abandoned,  and  we  sailed  over  to  the 
wharfs  near  the  oil-factories  for  a  run  on  shore. 
By  the  time  that  the  last  of  the  fishermen 
had  made  sail  for  home,  we  took  up  the  tail  of 
the  procession.  No  more  splendid  breeze  could 
be  desired — straight  from  the  southwest  and 
without  a  flaw.  With  our  centreboard  up  we 
cared  not  for  flats — there  was  enough  water  for 
us, — and  our  course  was  laid  straight  for  home. 
Every  thing  in  the  east  was  hazy,  and  it  looked 
as  if  rain  might  be  falling  in  the  neighborhood 
of  Montauk  Point,  for  the  sun  was  painting  re- 


126  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

splendent  pictures  upon  the  banks  of  clouds. 
Two  hours  later  we  swung  around  among  our 
little  Patchogue  fleet  and  made  fast  to  shore. 
The  wind  had  gone  down  with  the  sun  ;  the 
bay  was  like  a  mirror,  and  we  could  hear  the 
oars  of  people  becalmed  a  mile  from  home. 


MY  BEES. 

A  S  I  have  already  said  elsewhere,  my  bees 
**  have  contributed  a  few  dollars  a  year  to 
my  income,  and  have  given  me  a  great  many 
pounds  of  honey  and  no  little  amusement. 
Some  five  or  six  years  ago  a  newspaper  para- 
graph concerning  the  large  amount  of  money 
to  be  made  by  raising  bees  and  selling  their 
honey  caught  my  eye,  and  I  had  the  curiosity 
to  look  up  the  only  firm  in  this  part  of  the 
country  which  at  that  time  made  a  business  of 
selling  hives  fitted  out  with  bees.  My  investi- 
gation resulted  in  the  purchase  of  a  hive  con- 
taining a  swarm  of  pure  Italian  honey-bees 
warranted  to  do  justice  to  their  reputation  as 
indefatigable  workers,  and  to  make  my  fortune 
if  I  looked  after  them  with  intelligence  and 
perseverance.  The  people  from  whom  I  bought 
my  first  hive  were  full  of  information  as  to  the 
vast  amount  of  honey  and,  of  course,  profit  I 
was  to  get  from  my  investment ;  they  said 
127 


128  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

nothing  about  a  vast  number  of  stings.  Ac- 
cording to  the  rosy  picture  which  was  drawn 
of  my  future,  I  should  merely  have  to  buy  my 
hives  and  hire  a  convenient  place  in  which  to 
store  the  honey  as  it  was  produced  by  the  ton. 
I  was  told  that  any  neighborhood  where  vege- 
tation throve  was  good  for  bees,  and  that  an 
able-bodied  man  could  take  care  of  two  hun- 
dred hives  with  ease  and  live  in  comfort  upon 
the  products  of  his  little  servants.  The  details 
of  the  business  were  said  to  be  easy  to  learn, 
and  its  prosecution  one  long  delight.  In  sup- 
port of  this  story,  I  was  presented  with  several 
works  by  men  who  had  kept  bees  and  were 
impelled  from  the  enthusiasm  which  filled  them 
to  tell  the  world  how  much  money  and  joy 
might  be  found  in  bee-keeping.  One  man 
went  so  far  as  to  give  the  actual  amounts  which 
he  had  made  in  a  few  years,  with  fac-similes  of 
the  checks  he  had  received  in  payment  for  his 
enormous  shipments.  According  to  his  ac- 
count, bee-keeping  was  the  easiest,  pleasantest, 
and  most  profitable  of  all  employments  ;  all  the 
bee-keeper  had  to  do  was  to  take  out  the  honey 
from  the  hive  and  sell  it  to  the  misguided 
people  who  keep  no  hives  of  their  own.  An- 


MY  BEES.  129 

other  little  book  told  of  a  bright  young  city 
man  who  gave  up  the  delights  of  the  theatre 
and  base-ball  matches  to  retire  to  the  country 
with  a  hive  of  bees  ;  he  emerged  five  years 
later  with  something  like  a  fortune  made  out 
of  honey. 

The  first  supply  was  to  be  the  only  cost  of 
the  enterprise  beyond  that  of  the  hives  in 
which  to  place  other  swarms,  and  the  little 
boxes  which  are  put  in  the  hives  to  receive  the 
honey.  I  was  assured  that  very  few  people 
who  took  hold  of  the  business  gave  it  up 
because  of  the  stings  they  received,  and  that, 
if  I  could  take  the  opinion  of  all  bee-keepers 
upon  the  subject,  I  would  find  that  it  was 
virtually  a  chorus  of  praise  in  honor  of  this 
industry,  which  is  almost  literally  as  old  as  the 
hills,  and  yet  has  been  completely  revolution- 
ized, turned  upside  down,  within  the  last 
twenty  years.  For  centuries  people  had  gone 
on  allowing  bees  to  do  as  they  thought  fit. 
Twenty  years  ago  an  inventive  genius  discov- 
ered that  the  bees  knew  nothing  about  making 
the  most  of  their  time,  and  were  living  a  life  of 
riotous  idleness. 

It  is  some  five  years  since,  thus  induced  to 


130  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

consider  the  bee  business  as  something  which 
offered  me  exactly  what  I  wanted — a  life  of 
ease,  with  nothing  to  do  and  plenty  of  money, 
— I  paid  $15  for  my  hive  stocked  with  bees, 
$i  for  a  veil  to  put  over  my  head,  $2  for  a  pair 
of  rubber  gloves,  and  several  dollars  more  for 
various  implements  to  be  used,  as  I  found  out 
afterwards,  in  righting  the  infuriated  insects. 
My  bill  for  the  original  outfit  was  $20  and  some 
cents,  according  to  the  accounts  of  the  business, 
which  I  have  kept  with  great  care,  and  which 
are  now  before  me.  During  these  five  years  I 
have  had  an  experience  worth  all  the  money 
paid  out,  and  as  there  may  be  some  other 
people  anxious  for  a  life  of  ease  and  plenty  of 
money,  my  experience  may  not  be  without 
interest  and  profit  to  them.  Seriously,  I  have 
not  had  a  bad  time  of  it,  and  for  the  number 
of  hours  and  the  amount  of  money  which  I  have 
devoted  to  my  bees,  I  am  inclined  to  congratu- 
late myself  over  the  result,  and  to  advise  others 
to  at  least  make  the  experiment  of  keeping  a 
few  hives.  I  have  never  thought  of  honey- 
making  as  any  thing  but  the  amusement  of  idle 
hours  in  the  country,  and  I  first  gave  time  and 
thought  to  bee-raising  very  much  as  I  might  to 


MY  BEES.  131 

chicken-raising  or  any  other  hobby  of  the  city 
man  who  has  only  a  few  hours  in  the  country 
which  he  does  not  devote  to  sleep. 

My  first  hive  was  bought  when  I  was  living 
in  the  Orange  Mountains  of  New  Jersey,  about 
twenty  miles  from  New  York.  It  arrived  by 
express,  the  top  of  the  hive  covered  with  wire- 
cloth,  through  which  the  bees  peered  rather 
curiously  but  not  at  all  viciously.  The  direc- 
tions were  to  take  off  the  wire-cloth  as  carefully 
as  possible,  and  put  on  a  large  wooden  cover. 
As  the  construction  of  a  modern  beehive  is 
radically  different  from  that  of  the  old-fashioned 
straw  one,  I  may  as  well  say  a  few  words  about 
it.  The  essential  part  of  a  modern  hive  con- 
sists of  a  wooden  box  eighteen  inches  wide, 
two  feet  long,  and  about  fourteen  inches  deep. 
This  box  contains  from  eight  to  ten  "  frames," 
which  are  filled  up  with  a  sheet  of  comb  of  the 
average  thickness.  These  sheets  of  comb,  some- 
times partly  filled  with  honey  by  the  bees,  hang 
side  by  side  in  the  hive,  and  usually  occupy  the 
whole  of  the  box.  It  is  possible  to  lift  out  any 
one  of  the  frames  and  see  exactly  what  is  going 
on  upon  the  sheet  of  comb  it  contains.  The 
same  sheet  may  be  partly  given  up  to  honey, 


IJ2  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

or  may  contain  young  bees  in  the  various 
stages  of  growth  from  the  egg  to  the  live  bee. 
In  the  spring  there  is  usually  very  little  honey 
left  in  the  hive,  the  bees  having  eaten  it  all  dur- 
ing the  winter,  and  filled  up  the  empty  cells 
with  eggs,  fast  becoming  bees.  The  frames  of 
the  hives  are  not  often  disturbed  by  the  begin- 
ner in  bee-hiving,  since  the  bees  are  apt  to 
resent  this  investigation  into  their  private  apart- 
ments. Above  the  box  containing  the  frames 
comes  a  cover,  which  is  sufficiently  high  to 
allow  a  number  of  honey-boxes  to  be  placed 
right  on  top  of  the  frames.  These  honey-boxes 
are  easily  contained  in  a  large  case,  which 
enables  them  all  to  be  put  on  or  lifted  off 
together.  In  this  case  there  are  from  twenty 
to  thirty  boxes  to  be  filled  by  the  bees.  In 
some  hives  boxes  for  honey  are  also  placed  in 
the  lower  part  of  the  hive  along  the  outside 
walls,  when  the  bees  will  often  fill  them  in 
preference  to  going  up  into  the  cover  of  the 
hives. 

In  the  old-fashioned  hives  it  was  necessary  to 
kill  the  bees  by  suffocating  them  with  sulphur 
smoke  before  the  honey  could  be  cut  out  of  the 
hive.  In  the  new  hives,  if  I  may  so  call  the 


MY  SEES.  133 

hives  which  date  from  twenty  years  ago,  the 
bees  are  never  much  disturbed  when  honey  is 
taken  out  of  the  hive  ;  the  idea  of  killing  bees 
in  order  to  get  honey  would  now  be  considered 
atrocious  barbarism.  The  modern  method  of 
taking  the  honey-boxes  out  of  the  hives  is  sim- 
ply to  drive  the  bees  from  the  boxes  down  to 
their  own  frames  by  the  use  of  the  smoke  of 
rags,  when  the  boxes  may  be  lifted  off  without 
injuring  the  bees.  About  five  hundred  patents 
have  been  taken  out  within  the  last  twenty 
years  for  improved  beehives,  and  the  farmers 
in  some  parts  of  the  country  have  been  so 
annoyed  by  the  claims  of  people  who  pretend 
to  own  patent  rights  upon  hives  which  they 
had  purchased,  that  the  rapacity  of  these  hive 
inventors  has  driven  many  of  them  out  of  the 
business.  The  moment  a  man  bought  what 
seemed  to  be  a  sensible  and  cheap  hive,  he  was 
called  upon  to  pay  royalties  to  some  one  who 
claimed  the  patent.  The  number  of  different 
hives,  each  type  having  its  champions,  is  a  very 
large  one,  and  almost  every  well-known  bee- 
keeper has  left  a  hive  of  his  own  devising  which 
is  expected  to  do  something  that  other  hives 
will  not  do.  It  has  been  found  by  long  experi- 


134  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

ence  that  bees  are  very  accommodating  insects, 
and  will  adapt  themselves  to  almost  any  variety 
of  home,  provided  it  is  sufficiently  dark  and 
secure  from  the  attacks  of  animals. 

My  first  year's  experience  consisted  in  open- 
ing the  hives  every  day  or  two,  after  suffocating 
all  the  bees  with  five  times  the  necessary  amount 
of  smoke,  and  studying  what  was  going  on  in- 
side. This  effectually  prevented  the  bees  from 
making  any  honey,  but  it  gave  me  some  insight 
into  their  habits,  and  a  very  perfect  knowledge 
of  the  treatment  of  stings.  As  to  honey,  the 
first  year  was  only  a  partial  success.  The  very 
day  after  the  beehive  arrived  and  had  been  put 
in  place,  I  put  over  the  frames  every  honey-box 
that  came  with  the  hive,  and  watched  for  the 
result.  In  one  of  my  books  it  is  recorded  that 
a  swarm  of  bees  will  sometimes  bring  in  as 
much  as  twenty  pounds  of  honey  in  one  day  ; 
my  bees  had  evidently  never  read  this  book. 
I  could  not  find  that  they  brought  in  an  ounce, 
unless  for  their  own  use.  After  some  weeks  of 
anxious  watching  and  disappointment,  I  con- 
sulted a  neighbor,  who  knew  somebody  else 
whose  brother  had  once  had  a  beehive,  and  in 
the  end  I  discovered  that  an  old  farmer  ten 


MY  BEES.  135 

miles  off  had  some  bees,  and  actually  got  some 
honey  from  them  every  year.  I  went  to  see 
him,  and  found  out  that  in  that  part  of  Jersey, 
at  least,  bees  do  very  little  in  the  way  of  honey- 
making  from  the  end  of  June  until  the  end 
of  August ;  moreover,  that  if  I  want  to  get 
them  to  make  honey  in  the  little  boxes  which 
are  sold  by  the  grocers,  I  should  have  to  en- 
courage them  by  placing  in  each  box  a  little 
sheet  of  wax  marked  with  the  comb  indenta- 
tions. These  wax  "  starters  "  are  the  invention 
of  a  German  bee-keeper.  I  also  learned  that, 
in  order  to  get  the  bees  to  do  their  whole  duty, 
a  modern  device,  likewise  the  invention  of  a 
German,  known  as  an  "  extractor,"  would  be 
necessary. 

The  extractor  is  simply  a  tin  barrel  contain- 
ing a  frame  which  can  be  made  to  whirl  around 
upon  a  central  pivot.  Into  this  frame  the  hive 
combs,  when  they  contain  honey,  are  placed, 
and  made  to  revolve  so  rapidly  that  the  honey 
is  forced  out  of  the  cone  by  centrifugal  action 
and  trickles  down  to  the  bottom  of  the  extract- 
or. Before  bees  begin  to  store  honey  in  the 
little  boxes  in  the  top  of  the  hive,  they  first  fill 
up  such  parts  of  the  large  frames  as  are  not 


136  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

used  by  them  for  rearing  young ;  and  the  mo- 
tion of  the  extractor  is  so  regulated  that  the 
eggs  and  young  bees  are  not  thrown  out  with 
the  honey.  The  comb  having  been  emptied 
of  the  honey,  the  frame  is  replaced  in  the  hive, 
and  the  bees,  finding  their  stores  gone  and 
fearing  starvation,  will  go  to  work  again  with 
the  energy  of  despair.  Some  bee-keepers  use 
their  bees  entirely  for  producing  this  extracted 
honey,  and  never  make  any  box-honey,  as  the 
honey  in  the  comb  is  called.  The  sale  of  ex- 
tracted honey,  put  up  in  bottles,  is  naturally 
larger  than  that  of  box-honey,  as  it  can  be 
kept  in  better  order  and  for  a  longer  time ;  but 
its  price  is  less  by  several  cents  a  pound,  and 
the  temptation  to  adulterate  it  with  sugar  and 
water  has  given  it  a  bad  reputation  in  some 
communities.  As  yet  no  one  has  found  a 
method  of  making  artificial  comb  and  filling  it 
with  artificial  honey.  A  dealer  in  honey  said 
to  me  one  day :  "  These  rascals  who  adulterate 
honey  with  glucose  are  ruining  our  business  in 
extracted  honey.  Fortunately,  they  cannot  imi- 
tate comb-honey.  It  has  been  tried,  but  does 
not  succeed ;  I  would  give  $10,000  to  find  a 
good  method  of  doing  it."  So  much  for  busi- 


MY  BEES.  137 

ness  virtue.  The  only  way  in  which  adultera- 
tion comes  into  play  with  comb-honey  is  in  the 
practice  of  feeding  the  bees  upon  glucose  or 
maple-sugar  and  water,  which  mixture  they,  of 
course,  store  up  in  the  boxes  and  "  cap  "  over 
in  the  usual  way,  as  if  it  was  genuine  honey 
from  flowers. 

The  internal  economy  of  a  beehive,  with  its 
thousands  of  workers,  its  drones,  and  its  one 
queen,  has  been  described  so  often  in  print 
that  I  need  not  waste  space  upon  it.  A  good 
beehive,  well  filled,  contains  about  25,000  bees. 
My  first  beehive  had  about  5,000  when  it  came 
to  me,  but  reached  the  maximum  before  the  end 
of  the  autumn.  When  the  queen  lays  eggs,  she 
does  so  at  the  rate  of  several  hundred  a  day,  and 
in  less  than  three  weeks  the  bees  from  these 
eggs  are  flying  around.  Much  has  been  said  of 
late  as  to  the  superiority  of  the  Italian  bee, 
which  carries  three  yellow  bands  upon  its  body, 
over  the  native  black  bee,  and  as  high  as  $50 
have  been  paid  for  a  good  Italian  queen. 
Means  have  been  devised  of  so  packing  queens 
that  they  often  come  from  Europe  by  mail, 
and  are  sent  all  over  the  country  in  the  same 
way.  The  average  price  for  a  good  queen  is 


138  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

at  present  one  dollar.  At  the  end  of  my 
first  summer's  experience  in  the  bee  busi- 
ness, and  after  allowing  my  bees  to  take 
care  of  themselves  for  the  six  weeks  from  the 
middle  of  September  to  the  end  of  October, 
I  found  that  I  had  twelve  pounds  of  honey 
stored  up  in  boxes,  and  that  the  nine  frames 
of  the  lower  part  of  the  hive  were  completely 
full  of  honey  and  weighed  eight  pounds  apiece. 
I  took  out  three  of  the  frames  which  were 
filled  and  left  in  six  for  the  winter,  thus  giving 
the  bees  nearly  fifty  pounds  of  honey  to  live 
upon.  The  preparation  for  winter  in  Jersey  is 
simply  to  take  off  the  top  and  side  boxes,  fill- 
ing up  the  void  with  sawdust ;  I  left  the  hive 
out-of-doors,  and  I  have  followed  the  same 
plan  in  Connecticut  with  success.  In  northern 
New  England  and  in  the  northwestern  States, 
where  the  thermometer  often  falls  below  zero, 
it  is  customary  to  winter  the  hives  in  cellars. 

After  a  pretty  severe  winter  I  discovered  in 
the  first  sunshiny  days  of  March  that  my  bees 
were  coming  out  of  the  hive  freely,  and  taking 
a  warm  day  for  investigation,  I  lifted  out  a 
frame  to  find  it  full  of  "  brood,"  as  the  bees  not 
yet  out  of  the  cell  are  called.  As  the  spring 


MY  BEES.  139 

advanced  the  hive  became  more  and  more 
lively,  and  when  the  willows  blossomed  the 
noise  of  my  bees  could  be  heard  fifty  feet 
away ;  apparently  I  had  twice  as  many  bees  as 
in  the  autumn,  and  I  looked  forward  to  a  tre- 
mendous crop  of  honey.  Authorities  upon 
the  bee  business  say  that  the  average  product 
of  a  good  hive  ought  to  be  60  pounds  of 
honey  a  year.  Some  bee-keepers  boast  of 
having  obtained  100  pounds,  and  the  farmer 
who  still  keeps  bees  in  a  common  wooden  box, 
provided  with  no  movable  frames,  is  satisfied 
with  25  or  30  pounds.  May  came,  and  I  filled  my 
hives  with  boxes  fitted  out  with  wax  "  starters." 
The  hive  appeared  to  be  crowded  with  bees,  so 
much  so  that  early  in  May  a  tremendous  swarm 
came  out  one  day,  and  after  hanging  to  a  cedar 
tree  for  some  hours,  went  off  to  find  new 
quarters ;  I  was  away  in  the  city  and  lost  it. 
Swarming  is  nothing  more  or  less  than  a  sign 
that  the  hive  is  too  small  for  the  family.  The 
queen  goes  off  with  a  certain  number  of  the 
bees  to  find  a  new  home,  but  not  without  leav- 
ing things  in  such  a  state  that  a  new  queen 
will  be  hatched  out  in  a  few  days.  Within  ten 
days  of  the  loss  of  my  first  swarm,  another  one 


I4O  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

appeared  on  a  Sunday,  and  I  found  it  without 
difficulty  hanging  to  a  small  cedar  tree.  I  put 
the  cover  on  an  old  soap-box,  and  bored  two 
or  three  holes  in  one  side  of  the  box  with  an 
auger.  Then  I  put  it  on  the  ground  near  my 
first  hive,  carefully  cut  off  the  small  limb  upon 
which  my  swarm  had  clustered,  and  laid  the 
black  mass  down  in  front  of  the  soap-box,  with- 
in an  inch  or  two  of  the  auger  holes.  The  bees 
made  a  straight  line  for  these  openings,  tum- 
bling over  one  another  in  their  anxiety  to  get 
in.  In  half  an  hour  the  last  one  entered.  The 
next  day  I  bought  an  empty  hive  in  town. 
Upon  opening  my  soap-box  to  get  the  bees 
into  the  new  hive,  which  I  did  within  forty-eight 
hours,  I  found  that  they  had  already  begun 
making  comb  and  the  queen  had  begun  to  lay 
eggs.  I  made  the  transfer  without  difficulty. 
During  this  second  year  my  two  hives  gave  me 
between  them  forty-seven  pounds  of  honey  in 
boxes,  and  thirty-two  pounds  of  honey  which  I 
cut  from  the  frames.  I  found  that  the  best 
honey  season  in  that  part  of  the  country  was 
not  in  the  spring,  but  in  the  late  autumn,  the 
golden-rod  affording  most  of  the  supply.  At 
the  close  of  the  second  summer  I  prepared  the 


MY  BEES.  141 

bees  as  usual  and  left  them  out  in  the  snow  for 
the  winter. 

In  May  following  I  increased  my  number  of 
hives  to  four  by  taking  out  half  of  the  bees  in 
each  of  my  two  hives  and  putting  them  into 
new  hives.  The  process  is  too  complicated  for 
description  here  ;  every  bee-book  gives  a  de- 
tailed account  of  how  to  do  it.  I  succeeded 
perfectly.  From  my  two  old  hives  came  a 
swarm  apiece,  both  of  which  I  succeeded  in 
catching.  This  gave  me  six  hives.  The  third 
year  resulted  in  a  harvest  of  120  pounds  in 
boxes  and  90  pounds  in  the  frames.  The  result 
was  not  so  good  as  it  might  have  been  had  I 
watched  the  hives  carefully  enough  to  deter- 
mine exactly  when  the  frames  ought  to  have 
been  emptied  of  their  contents  by  the  use  of 
an  extractor.  I  have  never  taken  the  trouble  to 
get  an  extractor  at  all,  preferring  to  work  en- 
tirely for  box-honey.  Also,  I  did  not  take  out 
my  boxes  as  fast  as  they  were  filled,  and  this 
had  something  to  do  with  the  work  of  the 
bees,  who  do  their  best  when  starvation  threat- 
ens them.  For  the  fourth  year,  inasmuch  as 
six  hives  were  simply  flooding  me  and  my 
neighbors  with  honey,  I  neglected  to  hive  the 


142  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

swarms  at  all,  and  simply  let  them  go,  knowing 
that  more  honey  would  mean  a  serious  amount 
of  time  taken  in  looking  after  the  hives  and 
in  selling  the  honey.  The  last  year  has  given 
me  no  less  than  280  pounds  of  honey  in  boxes 
and  160  pounds  in  the  frames.  Half  of  this 
honey  has  been  sold  at  an  average  price  of  14 
cents  a  pound,  which  is  about  two  thirds  of 
the  price  obtained  for  it  by  the  local  grocer  to 
whom  I  sold  it. 

To  sum  up  the  results  of  my  experiments  in 
bee-culture,  I  have  six  hives  completely  filled 
with  bees  and  ready  for  the  winter,  which  have 
cost  me  in  all  $46,  including  the  original  outlay. 
During  the  five  years  I  have  spent  exactly  80 
cents  in  food  for  the  bees ;  when  the  spring  is 
very  late,  they  sometimes  require  to  be  helped 
along  with  a  little  candy.  I  estimate  the  value 
of  my  plant  at  $100,  and  my  honey  which  re- 
mains for  the  winter's  consumption  at  $30. 
The  time  necessary  to  look  after  and  take  care 
of  6  hives  is  certainly  not  more  than  three 
hours  a  week,  and  the  number  of  stings  received 
depends  upon  the  caution  and  skill  of  the  bee- 
keeper. I  have  found  that  it  is  not  necessary 


MY  BEES.  143 

to  be  stung  at  all,  and  that  even  when  a  few 
bees  do  manage  to  sting,  it  is  not  a  very  serious 
matter.  Any  man  who  wants  a  most  interest- 
ing hobby  can  find  no  end  of  interest  and  some 
honey  by  getting  a  beehive  and  putting  it  on 
the  roof,  even  if  he  lives  in  the  city.  Some 
years  ago  one  of  our  downtown  janitors,  who 
kept  a  small  apiary  on  the  top  of  a  big 
office  building,  had  to  give  it  up  because  a 
neighboring  candy-shop  on  Broadway  com- 
plained of  the  clouds  of  bees  which  the  candy 
attracted.  With  judicious  management  one 
hive  ought  to  give  enough  honey  for  a  family, 
and  to  require  almost  no  attention.  Bees  will 
fly  four  miles  in  search  of  honey,  so  that 
our  New  York  city  bees  get  most  of  their  sup- 
plies in  Jersey  or  over  on  Long  Island.  At  one 
time  a  few  years  ago  California  honey  seemed 
about  to  drive  our  Eastern  bees  out  of  the 
business.  Since  then,  however,  there  has  been 
a  reaction,  and  our  honey  is  preferred  for  its 
flavor,  and  higher  prices  are  paid  for  it.  One 
bee-keeper  of  Cherry  Valley,  New  York,  exports 
yearly  to  England  $25,000  worth  of  honey 
raised  by  his  own  bees.  I  am  now  about  to 


144  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

move  my  bees  down  to  my  Long  Island  home, 
having  found  that  there  are  thriving  apiaries  in 
the  neighborhood  and  plenty  of  buckwheat  and 
golden-rod  for  their  sustenance.  If  I  cannot 
get  several  hundred  pounds  of  honey  every 
year  to  offset  my  grocery  bill  I  shall  be  disap- 
pointed. 


"DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE." 

T  AM  sorry  for  the  man  who  cannot  get  pleas- 
^  ure  out  of  a  wood  fire.  One  of  the  prom- 
ising signs  of  the  times,  according  to  my  view, 
is  the  reappearance  of  the  open  hearth  in  most 
of  our  modern  country-houses.  If  the  aesthetic 
movement  in  house-building  leaves  us  no  other 
memento  of  its  passage  than  the  big  open 
hearth  and  the  andirons  of  our  forefathers,  we 
can  afford  to  be  thankful,  for  its  sins  are  as 
nothing  as  compared  to  this  blessing.  Twenty 
years  ago,  one  could  find  all  over  the  country 
noble  old  houses  in  which  the  big  fireplace  had 
been  bricked  up  in  order  to  substitute  a  grate 
for  coal,  or,  what  is  worse,  a  pipe-hole  for  a 
stove.  With  the  better  sentiment  of  the  last 
few  years,  the  fortunate  people  who  own  such 
houses  have  had  the  bricks  torn  down  and  the 
old  andirons  rescued  from  the  attic.  At  my 
own  fireside  I  have  a  pair  of  andirons  that  have 
been  in  use  in  the  family  for  more  than  a  hun- 
145 


146  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

dred  and  fifty  years,  and  it  is  no  small  pleasure 
to  dream  of  the  people,  long  since  dead  and 
gone,  who  have  watched  the  flames  reflected  in 
those  burnished  brass  relics  of  the  olden  time. 
The  man  who  has  not  learned  to  love  a  log  fire 
has  missed  one  of  the  comforts  of  life  ;  it  is  the 
love  of  a  fire  which  has  kept  me  from  moving 
to  Florida  or  some  country  where  vegetation 
and  gardens  flourish  the  year  round.  Fond  as 
I  am  of  working  among  growing  things,  and 
eagerly  as  I  look  forward  year  after  year  to  the 
first  dandelion,  I  cannot  bear  the  idea  of  losing 
my  noble  blaze  and  the  peculiar  odor  which  a 
log  fire,  especially  of  pine  wood,  gives  to  a  room 
when  the  winter  blast  outside  sends  an  occa- 
sional whiff  of  smoke  and  flame  down  the  chim- 
ney. Along  with  the  petty  miseries  of  life  in 
large  cities  I  should  be  inclined  to  place  the  ab- 
sence of  a  wood  fire,  for  even  if  there  is  a  big 
fireplace,  which  is  not  always  the  case  in  a  city 
house  of  the  ordinary  type,  wood  is  too  dear  to 
allow  of  its  use  as  I  understand  it.  I  want  a  fire 
of  logs  a  foot  through  and  four  feet  long,  which 
burns  from  morning  till  late  at  night,  which 
throws  out  light  enough  to  do  without  lamps 
until  the  dinner-bell  rings,  and  I  am  sure  that 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          147 

the  children  who  grow  up  with  the  remem- 
brance of  that  fire-light  hour  before  their  bed- 
time will  be  the  better  for  it.  It  will  inculcate 
in  them  a  love  of  something  healthy,  spiritually 
and  physically.  Thoreau  says :  "  Dead  trees 
love  the  fire." 

Of  all  the  woods  that  we  burn  upon  our  big 
hearth  in  winter,  the  balsam  pine  knots  are  the 
most  precious,  because  they  send  out  an  aro- 
matic odor  through  the  room  somewhat  akin  to 
that  of  sandal-wood.  Often,  when  the  gale 
does  not  send  us  a  whiff  of  smoke  backing 
down  the  chimney,  I  take  a  pine  knot  out  of 
the  fire  with  the  tongs  and  wave  it  through  the 
room  for  the  sake  of  getting  that  peculiar  scent 
which  has  always  seemed  full  of  medicinal  prop- 
erties. In  order  to  get  pine  knots  of  the  kind 
I  want,  we  make  two  or  three  trips  every 
summer  to  a  wooded  headland  within  six  miles 
of  us,  where  for  a  trifle  the  owner  has  given  me 
the  privilege  of  cutting  down  a  lot  of  old  pines 
that  are  fit  for  nothing  but  firewood  or  fence 
posts.  These  firewood  expeditions  are  hailed 
with  delight  by  the  children,  because  each  one 
constitutes  a  sort  of  picnic  for  them.  Yester- 
day was  one  of  our  firewood  days,  and  we  got 


148  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

off  by  a  glorious  morning  soon  after  seven 
o'clock,  taking,  of  course,  all  the  children  and  a 
friend  with  us.  As  we  marched  down  to  the 
boat,  our  axes,  fishing-poles,  and  oars  over  our 
shoulders,  we  met  the  first  stage  starting  from 
our  little  hotel  for  the  railroad  station,  full  of 
unfortunate  business  men  bound  to  New  York 
for  another  week's  heat,  worry,  fatigue,  and 
money.  I  suppose  that  every  one  of  them 
hoped  to  make  at  least  one  hundred  dollars  by 
the  week's  work,  for  life  is  expensive  when  one 
has  a  large  family  and  boards  at  the  country 
inn.  That  would  be  about  fifteen  dollars  a  day. 
I  was  going  to  earn  enough  firewood,  or  rather 
enough  pine  knots,  to  give  a  balsamic  scent  to 
our  fires  for  half  the  winter.  Probably  I  could 
have  hired  a  man  to  go  and  do  the  work  for  me 
and  bring  back  more  wood  than  I  should  re- 
quire, all  for  three  or  four  dollars.  If  money  is 
the  object  of  life,  then  my  conscience  ought  to 
prick  me  to  the  quick  as  we  nod  good-bye  to 
the  money-makers  and  keep  on  down  to  the 
bay.  There  is  but  little  breeze  stirring,  scarcely 
enough  to  send  us  along.  Nevertheless,  up 
goes  the  sail,  the  children  throwing  aboard 
their  baskets  and  bags  containing  the  lunch- 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          149 

eon,  and  we  cast  off  prepared  for  a  good  day's 
outing. 

It  sometimes  occurs  to  me  whether  there 
may  not  be  such  a  thing  as  the  cultivation  of 
idleness — whether  the  love  of  idleness  does  not 
grow  by  idleness.  Many  people  have  told  me 
that  the  normal  man  needs  to  work  in  order  to 
be  healthy  and  happy,  and  by  work  they  mean 
money-making  of  some  kind.  This  giving  a 
whole  day  to  going  after  a  quarter  of  a  cord  of 
pine  knots  would  be  looked  upon  as  a  peculiarly 
vicious  idleness  because  of  the  specious  attempt 
to  dissimulate.  I  remember  many  years  ago, 
when  quite  a  young  man,  that  chance  threw 
me  out  of  business  for  several  months,  and  as  it 
happened  I  employed  most  of  my  time  in  strip- 
ping a  superb  orchard  of  its  apples  and  barrel- 
ing them  for  sale  in  the  city.  I  forget  exactly 
what  the  venture  netted  me  in  money.  The 
apples  were  going  to  waste  and  I  invested  the 
necessary  money  in  empty  barrels  and  freight 
charges.  The  work,  I  did  myself,  beginning 
before  breakfast  and  stopping  when  it  grew  too 
dark  to  tell  a  good  apple  from  a  bad  one.  Then 
I  went  back  to  routine  work  at  my  own  profes- 
sion. But  in  after  years  the  memory  of  that 


150  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

apple-picking  became  a  delight.  I  often  spoke 
of  it  to  friends,  only  to  be  told  that  no  one  but 
the  laziest  of  men  would  think  of  wasting 
months  in  an  apple  orchard.  Perhaps  as  a 
business  investment,  such  work  might  pay  the 
wages  of  a  day  laborer,  but  it  was  unworthy  of 
a  man  who  could  earn  ten  or  twenty  dollars  a 
day  by  writing  newspaper  articles  or  trading  in 
lead  pipe  or  leather.  Moreover,  I  was  assured 
that  had  I  kept  on  for  a  few  months  longer  at 
such  work,  it  would  have  filled  me  with  pro- 
found discontent  and  a  wild  desire  to  get  back 
to  the  city  at  any  cost.  I  was  assured  that  for 
any  man  above  the  rustic  lout,  the  country  and 
all  its  occupations  would  be  intolerable  except 
as  a  recreation  for  a  few  weeks  of  the  year, 
unless  there  was  plenty  of  money  wherewith  to 
live  a  life  of  absolute  idleness  and  watch  others 
work.  It  has  always  been  taken  for  granted  by 
these  good  friends  of  mine  that  this  is  so  self- 
evident  as  to  require  no  argument.  The  man 
who  wants  to  earn  bread  and  butter  for  his 
family  must  work  in  the  city.  Yet  all  these 
years,  I  have  retained  a  sneaking  fondness  for 
the  belief  that  years  of  work  in  an  apple  orchard 
might  not  result  disastrously  for  me  or  mine. 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          151 

I  recall  the  fact  that  during  those  three  months 
I  was  never  better  in  health,  that  I  never  took 
greater  pleasure  in  my  books  and  papers,  that  I 
never  looked  upon  life  with  more  satisfaction. 
And  this  accidental  taste  of  country  life  at  a 
profit  of  a  dollar  or  two  a  day,  a  small  sum  as 
compared  to  my  city  earnings,  had  great  in- 
fluence in  my  determination  to  cut  loose  from 
the  city  for  a  large  part  of  the  year. 

To  come  back  to  the  Great  South  Bay,  it  was 
as  smooth  as  a  mill-pond,  as  we  made  sail  for 
our  headland,  looming  up  cool  and  shady  to 
the  eastward.  The  water  was  so  clear  beneath 
us  that  each  patch  of  oysters  could  be  dis- 
tinguished on  the  bottom.  Our  friend  M., 
whom  we  had  along  with  us,  and  to  whom  I 
sang  the  praises  of  a  pine-knot  fire,  suggested 
that  if  every  one  took  to  wood  fires  and  burned 
up  a  dozen  cords  of  wood  in  the  winter,  as 
we  did,  wood  would  become  exorbitantly  dear, 
and  none  but  millionaires  would  be  able  to 
afford  it.  It  is  said  that  it  takes  the  wood  of 
five  square  miles  every  year  to  furnish  matches 
for  the  world,  the  daily  consumption  in  this 
country  reaching  ten  matches  per  head  for 


I$2  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

every  man,  woman,  and  child.  And  about  once 
a  year  the  papers  contain  articles  warning  the 
people  that  our  forests  are  disappearing,  never 
to  grow  again.  This  sort  of  talk  is  rather  lost 
upon  any  one  who  lives  down  on  Long  Island 
anywhere  beyond  Babylon,  for  here  there  are 
tracts  of  country  where  one  can  walk  for  miles 
and  miles  without  meeting  a  soul  or  seeing 
a  house,  and  yet  covered  with  a  growth  of 
excellent  firewood,  untouched  almost  from 
generation  to  generation.  Yet  we  are  with- 
in seventy-five  miles  of  the  greatest  city  on 
the  continent.  If  New  York  City  should  ever 
take  to  wood  fires,  Long  Island  can  grow 
wood  just  as  well  as  cabbages.  Even  now, 
when  our  Long  Island  woods  have  been  shame- 
fully neglected  for  generations,  no  one  ever 
thinking  of  replanting  a  forest  that  has  been 
cut  down  or  burned  up,  good  firewood,  of 
pine  or  oak,  can  be  bought  for  three  dollars  a 
cord,  cut  and  delivered.  A  cord  of  wood  will 
give  a  roaring  blaze  every  night  for  a  month. 
If  you  cut  the  wood  yourself,  as  I  do,  you  can 
have  it  almost  for  nothing.  There  may  come 
a  time  when  wood  will  become  scarce  in  this 
neighborhood,  but  it  will  not  be  in  my  day  or 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.  153 

in  the  day  of  the  children  whom  I  am  teaching 
to  look  upon  a  blazing  hearth  as  an  essential 
feature  of  home.  By  that  time,  man  will 
probably  get  his  heat  from  stored-up  sunlight, 
or  from  electricity  furnished  by  the  rush  of  the 
tides  or  the  sweep  of  the  winds. 

As  we  have  a  good  hour's  sail  before  us,  one 
of  the  party  reads  out  Thoreau's  chapter  on 
firewood,  a  wonderful  study  which  rather 
dwarfs  all  attempts  to  say  much  upon  the 
same  subject.  This  is  what  I  call  a  happiness 
beyond  the  making  of  any  number  of  dollars. 
Here  we  are  in  our  staunch,  safe  boat,  gliding 
along  with  just  enough  sea  breeze  to  take  us 
to  that  haven  where  we  would  be,  my  wife  and 
children  finding  health  and  spirits  in  it,  a  few 
books  and  magazines,  and  the  prospect  of  sev- 
eral hours  of  hard,  healthy  work  in  the  woods 
before  we  make  sail  for  home  as  the  sun  goes 
down.  The  boom  of  the  surf  is  the  only  sound 
that  comes  to  us  as  we  reach  the  middle  of  the 
bay  and  head  straight  for  the  little  half-rotten 
dock  which  is  all  that  is  left  of  some  improve- 
ments made  years  ago  by  a  company  of  specu- 
lators who  expected  to  establish  a  summer  re- 
sort at  the  point  we  are  steering  for.  Away 


154  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

to  the  north  of  us  a  puff  of  steam  or  smoke 
shows  where  the  locomotive  is  dragging  those 
poor  wretches  off  to  their  daily  treadmill. 
How  very  far  away  all  such  life  seems.  If  it 
were  not  for  the  daily  newspapers,  I  should 
almost  forget  that  there  were  so  many  miser- 
able beings  grinding  out  their  few  years  of 
existence  with  so  utter  a  disregard  of  the  es- 
sential facts  in  the  case.  That  puff  of  smoke 
is  the  last  reminder  of  civilization  that  we  shall 
have  during  the  day  before  we  sight  our  village 
again.  As  the  last  line  of  Thoreau's  chapter  is 
read,  the  boat  swings  round  into  the  breeze  and 
Arthur  jumps  ashore  and  makes  us  fast,  while 
we  gather  up  our  implements  of  work.  The 
shore  here  presents  a  picture  not  unusual  at 
this  part  of  the  bay.  For  three  or  four  hun- 
dred feet  from  the  water  there  is  a  meadow 
filled  with  low  bushes  and  blackberry  vines  of 
the  creeping  type.  Then  comes  a  rise  in  the 
ground,  and  a  plateau  stretches  away  to  the 
north,  covered  with  a  heavy  growth  of  trees. 
The  spot  is  a  superb  one  for  a  big  hotel  or  a 
colony  of  cottages,  and  undoubtedly  it  would 
long  ago  have  been  used  for  this  purpose  but 
for  the  distance  from  the  railroad ;  it  is  a  five- 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          155 

mile  drive  to  the  nearest  railway  station,  and 
that  would  be  a  fatal  waste  of  time  to  any  busi- 
ness man.  One  of  the  reasons  given  for  the 
success  of  the  big  hotel  at  Babylon  is  that  it 
stands  so  near  the  railroad  that  the  New  Yorker 
can  step  from  his  train  to  the  piazza  of  the 
hotel. 

The  shore  presents  this  morning  a  beautiful 
picture  of  absolute  calm.  At  nine  o'clock 
nothing  is  heard  as  we  stand  on  the  little  wharf 
and  survey  the  scene  but  the  distant  boom  of 
the  surf  to  the  south  of  us  on  the  other  side  of 
the  sand-bar,  and  the  singing  of  the  birds  in  the 
woods  around  us.  The  bay  sleeps  quietly  in 
the  sunlight,  and  the  whole  Long  Island  coast 
is  in  brilliant  relief,  with  its  hills  in  the  back- 
ground, just  beginning  to  show  the  first  tints 
of  autumn.  Our  miniature  forest  is  but  a  five 
minutes'  stroll  up  to  the  headland,  and  the 
children  begin  an  attack  on  the  last  of  the 
blackberries  as  we  go  along.  Upon  reaching 
our  grove  I  spied  my  old  friend  the  Cap'n 
coming  along  the  shore  in  his  cat-boat  from  a 
visit  to  some  distant  eel-pots,  and  with  the  con- 
viction that  he  may  have  something  worth 
buying  besides  eels,  I  go  down  to  the  shore 


156  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

and  hail  him.  I  stand  high  in  the  Cap'n's  con- 
sideration just  now — that  is,  as  high  as  any 
land  lubber  can  ever  expect  to  stand,  for  I  have 
placed  at  the  side  of  my  writing-desk  one  of 
his  eel-pots  which  I  use  as  a  scrap-basket.  I 
got  the  Cap'n  to  make  it  for  half  a  dollar,  and 
as  I  couldn't  quite  make  him  understand  for 
exactly  what  purpose  I  wanted  it,  as  a  waste- 
basket  is  something  he  had  never  heard  of,  he 
made  me  a  perfect  eel-pot,  and  having  put  it  in 
place  I  called  him  in  and  showed  him  how 
admirably  its  served  its  purpose.  It  was  nauti- 
cal, ichthyological,  and  harmonizes  with  the 
room  full  of  nets,  poles,  and  guns.  The  Cap'n 
was  so  much  pleased  with  the  sight  of  his  eel- 
pot  half  full  of  the  waste  from  my  desk  that  I 
can  scarcely  get  him  to  accept  pay  for  bait,  and 
some  day  I  think  that  he  will  show  me  a  few  of 
the  places  in  the  bay  where  weak-fish  are  really 
caught,  instead  of  many  places  where  they  are 
not,  as  is  the  custom  with  professional  fisher- 
men. Sure  enough,  the  Cap'n  has  a  bushel  of 
clams  in  his  boat  which  he  is  taking  over  to  the 
beach  for  a  friend,  and  it  is  not  hard  to  divert 
the  store  to  our  own  purposes.  The  children 
come  down  to  the  shore  and  I  pull  the  basket 


DEAD  TUBES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          157 

up  the  bank  under  the  shade  of  some  pines, 
while  they  begin  to  collect  firewood  enough  for 
a  clambake  at  dinner-time.  If  we  cannot  get 
clams  at  our  end  of  the  bay,  the  water  being 
too  fresh  so  far  from  an  ocean  inlet,  we  can  at 
least  have  them  brought  from  fifteen  to  twenty 
miles  farther  down,  and  then  they  can  be 
thrown  into  the  water,  where  they  will  live  for 
months,  to  be  taken  up  whenever  wanted. 

The  real  work  of  the  day  then  began.  While 
the  ladies  sewed  and  read  in  the  shade,  and 
the  children  picked  late  blackberries,  we  sturdy 
laborers  undertook  to  cut  down  half-a-dozen 
small  pines  and  saw  their  gnarled  limbs  into 
suitable  pieces  for  the  fire.  It  was  hot  work, 
and  it  made  it  hotter  to  think  of  the  blaze 
that  we  were  preparing  for.  To  quote  Tho- 
reau  again,  he  used  to  say  that  he  got  more 
warmth  out  of  cutting  his  firewood  than  out 
of  its  blaze,  and  his  conscience  was  never  quite 
easy  as  to  the  return  he  made  for  the  blessings 
of  a  log  fire.  He  used  to  say  that  though  he  had 
paid  money  to  the  owner  of  that  wood,  he  was 
never  quite  sure  that  the  debt  had  been  wholly 
discharged.  In  two  hours  we  had  done  enough 
of  our  work  to  see  that  with  a  little  sawing 


158  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

after  dinner  there  would  be  sufficient  to  load 
up  the  boat,  and  then  after  a  short  rest  we  be- 
gan to  prepare  for  dinner.  Whoever  wants  to 
know  what  clams  are  worth,  must  cook  them 
on  the  shore,  and  with  drift-wood  picked  up 
for  the  purpose.  I  have  tried  a  clam-bake  in 
our  garden,  I  have  tried  it  on  the  kitchen 
stove,  but  whether  the  difference  is  in  the 
clams  or  in  our  appetites,  the  result  is  never 
the  same.  It  is  the  easiest  thing  in  the  world 
to  bake  clams  to  perfection,  if  a  few  simple 
rules  are  observed.  Sweep  a  flat  space  upon 
the  sand,  and  lay  upon  it  the  sort  of  griddle 
made  for  the  purpose,  which  can  be  found  all 
over  Long  Island.  The  clams  are  held  upright 
in  this  griddle,  which  holds  at  least  one  hun- 
dred, and  sometimes  more.  Right  on  top  of 
the  clams  build  a  loose  fire  of  the  drift-wood,  and 
after  it  has  blazed  well  for  five  minutes,  and 
the  clams  begin  to  hiss  violently,  half  smother 
it  with  wet  sea-weed ;  a  moment  after,  one  or 
two  clams  may  be  tested.  Pick  one  out  with  a 
pair  of  tongs  and  throw  it  up  in  the  air,  letting 
it  come  down  upon  any  hard  surface,  a  board, 
or  a  stone.  If  it  flies  open,  all  is  well,  and  the 
feast  may  begin  ;  if  not,  the  clams  are  not 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          159 

quite  done.  When  all  is  ready,  shovel  them 
into  a  large  tin  pan.  We  always  keep  the 
implements  for  a  clam-bake  in  one  of  the  lock- 
ers of  the  boat,  for  scores  of  times  every  sum- 
mer we  find  that  we  can  have  a  clam-bake 
when  we  least  expected  it,  just  as  it  happened 
this  morning.  Two  hundred  clams  disap- 
peared among  seven  of  us,  almost  sooner  than 
it  takes  to  tell  the  tale,  and  back  we  went  to 
our  work. 

As  I  shouldered  my  axe  again  I  could  not 
help  one  more  thought  of  the  miserable  toilers 
in  town.  Was  I  stealing  a  living?  If  so,  the  old 
adage  regarding  stolen  sweets  once  more  proved 
true.  The  children  are  set  at  work  carrying 
the  wood  down  to  the  shore  ready  to  be  put 
on  board,  and  even  the  youngest,  a  sturdy 
damsel  of  not  quite  four,  shouts  with  indig- 
nation if  any  one  proposes  to  help  her  along 
with  her  load.  It  is  not  four  o'clock  when 
we  have  enough  wood  to  fill  up  the  sail-boat, 
and  we  have  to  put  some  of  it  on  deck.  It 
has  turned  out  to  be  a  pretty  hot  day,  and 
as  there  is  enough  breeze  to  take  us  home  in 
less  than  an  hour,  we  decide  for  a  surf-bath, 
and  the  Nellie  s  prow  is  turned  over  to  the 


l6o  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

beach,  a  mile  off.  I  suppose  that  with  some 
people  the  daily  surf-bath  from  June  till  Octo- 
ber might  become  so  much  a  matter  of  course 
as  to  lose  half  its  delights.  As  with  country 
life,  so  it  is  with  the  surf,  so  far  as  I  am  con- 
cerned. It  is  always  the  keenest  of  pleasures 
and  never  more  so  than  after  a  good  day's 
hard  physical  work.  By  five  o'clock  we  make 
sail  for  home,  and  for  an  hour  we  have  before 
us  a  more  splendid  painting  than  was  ever 
made  by  man.  Here,  on  the  Great  South  Bay, 
we  seem  to  be  particularly  favored  in  the  mat- 
ter of  sunsets,  for  certainly  more  than  half  our 
days  end  with  one  of  these  color  displays  as 
changing  as  it  is  indescribable.  We  have 
grown  so  used  to  these  wonderful  pictures  that 
adjectives  and  superlatives  have  long  ago 
been  used  up ;  some  one  points  now  and  then 
to  a  particularly  exquisite  blending  of  gold 
and  silver,  and  the  rest  of  the  party  nod  in 
silence.  By  the  time  we  reach  our  harbor,  the 
sun  has  gone  down  with  the  breeze,  and  we 
drift  slowly  into  the  little  slip.  The  village  is 
at  supper,  and  my  friend,  the  Cap'n,  who 
stands  on  the  dock,  is  the  only  one  to  greet  us. 
He  peers  curiously  at  the  wood,  and  seems 


DEAD  TREES  LOVE  THE  FIRE.          l6l 

doubtful  when  I  tell  him  that  it  is  to  burn. 
For  the  Cap'n  also  has  his  ideas  about  queer 
people  who  waste  a  whole  day  and  sail  ten 
miles  to  get  a  lot  of  pine  knots  that  any  "  nig- 
ger" would  have  delivered  for  a  two-dollar  bill. 
The  Cap'n's  notion  of  otium  cum  dignitate  is 
probably  an  unfailing  supply  of  tobacco,  and  an 
endless  conference  around  the  village  store  stove 
upon  the  affairs  of  the  neighborhood  and  the 
nation.  I  told  him  once  that  I  should  think 
he  would  enjoy  making  eel-pots,  for  the  work 
has  a  certain  fascination  about  it — this  weaving 
together  of  strong,  supple  twigs  of  oak,  the 
converting  of  an  old  log  into  hundreds  of  pots 
that  will  do  duty  for  years.  Every  day  the 
Cap'n  can  feel  that  he  has  produced  something 
of  value,  which  is  more  than  a  great  many 
more  pretentious  people  I  know  of  can  say. 
Down  comes  the  sail,  and  while  the  boys  tie  it 
up  and  make  the  ropes  ship-shape  for  the  night, 
we  gather  up  our  traps  and  start  for  the  house, 
leaving  the  Cap'n  deep  in  thought,  as  he 
squints  first  at  the  horizon  and  then  at  our 
little  pile  of  logs.  Even  twelve  hours  of  open 
air  have  not  quite  satisfied  me,  and  were  it  not 
for  several  letters  to  write  and  a  good  many 


1 62  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

proof-sheets  to  read,  I  should  like  to  join  the 
Cap'n  in  a  tour  of  his  eel-pots.  There  is  no 
wind,  so  that  the  bay  reflects  every  star  as  it 
peeps  out,  and  away  down  in  the  southwest 
we  catch  a  gleam  from  the  Fire  Island  light. 


THE   LIFE    WORTH    LIVING— HENRY  DAVID 
THOREAU. 

TT  has  often  been  urged  that  such  a  scheme  as 
mine  would  be  all  very  well  for  a  man  with 
even  a  small  income,  say  sufficient  to  insure  him 
and  his  family  against  starvation  at  any  time, 
and  to  give  him  the  few  luxuries  which  with 
most  people  of  refinement  have  become  almost 
necessary.  For  instance,  even  an  income  of 
five  hundred  dollars  a  year  might  warrant  a 
person  of  very  simple  tastes  in  making  such  an 
experiment  as  I  have  outlined ;  such  a  sum 
would,  at  least,  provide  oatmeal  and  milk,  bread 
and  coffee.  It  would  be  largely  a  return  to 
first  principles  in  household  economy,  but  there 
are  people  who  would  not  grumble  could  they 
exchange  a  life  of  intellectual  plenty  even  at 
this  cost  of  superfluities.  So  modest  a  sum 
as  five  hundred  dollars  a  year,  if  used  with  skill, 
might  provide  a  glimpse  of  such  dissipation  as 
an  occasional  theatre,  or  a  strain  of  music  in 
163 


164  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  depth  of  winter,  the  only  time  when  the 
real  countryman  would  have  the  time  to  leave 
his  home,  or  the  inclination  to  do  so.  The  rest 
of  the  year  would  be  pretty  fully  taken  up.  In 
my  own  case,  it  happens  that  unlike  most  men 
who  have  to  look  to  the  earnings  of  the  year 
for  bread  and  butter,  I  can  throw  all  city  work 
overboard  when  the  spring  opens,  and  not  set 
foot  in  town  before  the  snow  flies.  To  most 
men,  and  to  all  business  men,  such  an  arrange- 
ment is  impossible ;  the  merchant  cannot  inter- 
rupt his  work  for  so  long  a  time  with  any  cer- 
tainty that  he  will  be  able  to  pick  it  up  again  ; 
the  clerk  in  a  shop  or  a  factory  must  be  at  his 
post  all  the  year  around,  or  not  at  all ;  the 
lawyer  has  to  "keep  track"  of  his  clients' 
affairs,  or  he  would  soon  find  himself  without 
clients.  The  world's  machinery  cannot  stop, 
and  the  engineers  must  be  at  their  posts. 
There  are  very  few  occupations  outside  of  cer- 
tain departments  of  journalism  which  can  be 
taken  up  and  thrown  down  at  will.  The  mer- 
chant, the  clerk,  the  lawyer,  the  doctor,  must 
remain  at  their  posts  pretty  much  the  year 
around,  and  this  rule  obtains  all  the  more 
strictly  with  subordinates. 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  165 

Therefore  the  problem  becomes  in  the  case 
of  ninety-nine  men  out  of  a  hundred  :  Either  to 
give  up  one  or  the  other.  I  have  listened  to 
scores  of  persons  to  whom  I  have  submitted 
this  problem,  who  are  very  certain  that  no 
man,  especially  if  bred  in  a  large  city,  would 
consent  to  forsake  the  pleasures  of  the  town 
for  the  quiet  of  the  country.  I  took  the 
trouble  once  to  find  out,  as  nearly  as  possible, 
exactly  what  the  average  business  man  means 
by  the  word  "  pleasure."  It  seems  that  in  the 
opinion  of  the  typical  young  man  of  business, 
pleasure  means  going  to  the  theatre  once  or 
twice  a  week,  meeting  large  numbers  of  other 
young  men  and  young  women  in  the  shops,  or 
in  the  streets,  or  in  their  homes,  or  at  church. 
The  essence  of  this  pleasure  is  the  crowd, — 
largely  of  inane  people  characterized  by  unrest, 
hurry,  or  idle  curiosity.  This  same  love  of  the 
crowd  characterizes  many  strata  of  society  in 
cities,  and  the  disease  seems  to  thrive  by  what 
it  feeds  upon.  As  an  illustration,  take  the  his- 
tory of  the  efforts  made  by  one  of  our  charita- 
ble societies  to  induce  some  of  the  very  poorest 
inhabitants  of  our  most  squalid  neighborhoods 
to  get  into  the  country.  For  nearly  twenty 


1 66  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

years  the  district  lying  between  the  Bowery  and 
the  East  River  in  New  York  City  has  been 
crowded  with  very  poor  people,  who  make  a 
business  of  sewing  upon  ready-made  clothing. 
They  are  largely  Polish  Jews  of  small  intelli- 
gence, and  apparently  no  instinct  beyond  self- 
preservation.  They  live,  or  rather  herd,  to- 
gether in  vile  holes,  for  which  they  pay  exorbi- 
tant rents,  and  their  life  is  one  long  struggle  and 
incessant  work.  According  to  credible  reports, 
work  begins  soon  after  daybreak  and  lasts  far 
into  night,  when  the  poor  wretches  sink  down 
exhausted  upon  the  piles  of  clothing  which 
they  are  making  for  the  cheap  shops  of  the 
country.  Whole  families  live  and  die  in  this 
wretchedness,  the  children  knowing  no  child- 
hood, as  we  understand  it,  and  old  age  being 
out  of  the  question  in  this  atmosphere  of  foul 
air  and  incessant  toil.  It  is  not  the  work  of 
healthy  people,  but  a  nervous  strain  to  accom- 
plish two  days'  work  in  one.  In  many  visits 
which  I  have  made  to  such  homes,  I  have  in- 
variably noticed  that  the  workers  seldom  look 
up,  and  then  only  for  a  hurried  glance — time  is 
too  precious.  Well,  the  society  in  question  at- 
tempted to  solve  the  problem  before  them. 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  l6/ 

Here  were  thousands  and  thousands  of  people 
who  never  knew  what  rest  or  recreation  really 
meant,  whose  children  had  never  seen  a  green 
field,  or  had  had  a  real  play  in  good  air,  whose 
lives  were  apparently  hopeless.  Ask  some  of 
the  most  intelligent  of  these  slaves  of  the  needle 
why  they  cannot  move  out  into  the  suburbs 
where  they  could  get  nice  little  cottages  for 
less  money  than  they  pay  in  their  horrible 
quarters  in  the  tenement  districts,  and  the 
answer  is  always  that  they  cannot  spare  the 
time  needed  to  go  back  and  forth  with  the 
bundles  of  clothing  upon  which  the  family 
labors.  In  New  York  such  errands  require  but 
a  few  moments;  in  the  country  they  would  take 
up  time  and  money  for  car  fares. 

The  society  resolved  to  do  away  with  that 
trouble  by  paying  for  the  expressage  of  cloth- 
ing to  and  from  the  city  for  people  who  might 
like  to  move  away,  and  a  quiet  spot  was  found 
out  on  Long  Island  where  a  dozen  little  houses 
were  made  ready  for  the  first  colony  of  these 
people.  When  it  came  to  actually  leaving  New 
York  there  was  some  trouble  in  inducing  a 
dozen  families  to  go,  but  by  collecting  people 
with  many  children  and  making  the  rents  of 


1 68  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  cottages  almost  nominal,  a  dozen  families 
were  found  to  make  the  experiment.  In  less 
than  a  year  and  a  half  the  scheme  was  aban- 
doned. At  no  time  were  the  cottages  all 
occupied  after  the  first  month,  and  it  required 
great  inducements  to  prevail  upon  the  tenants 
to  remain  more  than  a  quarter.  The  reasons 
given  by  them  for  returning  to  New  York 
were,  in  all  cases,  the  same :  the  women  of 
the  family  were  lonely — they  missed  the  society 
of  the  tenements.  They  missed  the  life  of 
the  streets,  the  drunken  brawls,  the  yells  and 
screams,  the  dirt,  the  noise,  the  heat,  the  foul 
air,  and  language  of  the  slums.  The  children 
may  have  enjoyed  the  country,  but  their  elders 
wanted  society.  Going  higher  in  the  social 
scale,  it  seems  to  be  very  much  the  same  story. 
People  with  not  much  to  think  about  cannot 
get  on  without  the  crowd,  no  matter  what  kind 
of  a  crowd.  I  am  convinced  that  this  is  a  far 
more  potent  factor  in  keeping  people  in  great 
cities  and  attracting  them  than  the  prospect  of 
better  clothes  and  whiter  hands  which  the  shop 
offers  to  the  young  man  from  the  farm.  There- 
fore in  order  to  wean  city  people,  who  ought 
not  to  live  in  the  city,  away  from  improper 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  169 

environment  it  is  necessary  to  influence  them 
in  some  other  way  than  the  offer  of  purely 
physical  or  economical  advantages.  Proba- 
bly but  very  little  can  be  done  in  this  field 
except  through  the  children,  and  the  value 
of  the  work  accomplished  by  the  Children's 
Aid  Society  in  sending  out  waifs  picked  out 
from  the  streets  to  green  fields  and  pastures 
new  in  the  far  West,  cannot  be  overestimated. 
With  the  average  young  man  or  young  woman, 
who  finds  ample  enjoyment  in  the  gossip  of  the 
shops  and  is  inclined  to  pity  any  one  condemned 
to  country  life,  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  the 
case  is  almost  equally  hopeless.  The  man 
who  takes  nothing  into  the  country  with  him, 
intellectually  speaking,  ought  not  to  go  there ; 
-he  will  be  lonely.  I  was  strongly  impressed 
with  this  phase  of  the  matter  when  I  made 
some  visits  among  the  cheap  shops  which  line 
Grand  Street,  east  of  the  Bowery.  There  are 
large  shops  here,  employing  hundreds  of  clerks 
of  both  sexes.  Work  begins  early  and  lasts 
until  seven  or  eight  o'clock  in  the  evening.  In 
many  of  the  shops  it  is  so  dark  that  gas  or 
electric  lights  have  to  be  used  at  mid-day. 
The  neighborhood  is  alive  with  people  of  the 


1/0  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

lower  and  middling  classes,  and  the  life  of  a 
clerk  in  one  of  these  shops  is  perpetual  motion. 
I  questioned  young  men  and  young  women 
in  these  shops  as  to  how  they  liked  their  work, 
and  as  to  why  they  did  not  try  to  get  into  some- 
thing that  offered  them  more  time  and  better 
air.  In  no  case  out  of  twenty  or  thirty  persons 
whom  I  addressed  as  particularly  likely  to 
sympathize  with  the  suggestion  that  such  a  life 
in  such  a  place  was  the  life  of  a  dog,  did  I 
meet  with  a  responsive  note.  It  seemed  to 
these  people  that  all  was  right ;  it  was  a  case  of 
where  "  ignorance  is  bliss." 

I  remember  again  passing  through  Grand 
Street  early  one  morning  last  summer,  on  my 
way  to  take  the  train  for  a  far-off  country 
village.  The  morning  was  intensely  uncom- 
fortable, the  forerunner  of  a  terrible  day,  sure 
to  count  its  victims  by  the  score.  In  front  of 
every  shop  along  this  thoroughfare  were  groups 
of  clerks  busy  piling  up  dry  goods  in  more  or 
less  artistic  shape,  intended  to  impress  the 
passers.  I  saw  hundreds  of  men,  many  of  them 
gray-headed  and  able-bodied,  who  seemed  to 
find  nothing  unpleasant  about  their  work.  To 
one  or  two  I  ventured  the  remark  as  I  went 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  I/I 

along  that  it  was  going  to  be  a  very  hot  day, 
and  that  the  country  boys  had  the  advantage 
of  their  city  brothers.  Even  that,  the  few 
clerks  to  whom  I  spoke  were  inclined  to  dispute. 
The  country  lad,  they  argued,  had  his  troubles. 
It  was  hot  in  the  cornfield  as  well  as  on  Grand 
*  Street,  and  while  the  dry-goods  clerk  could 
retire  into  the  depths  of  the  shop,  the  farm  lad 
had  to  work  away.  I  found  no  one  inclined  to 
prefer  the  life  of  field  work  to  which  I  looked 
forward  to  that  of  the  Grand  Street  dry-goods 
shops.  These  young  gentlemen  would  carry 
nothing  with  them  should  they  abandon  the 
shop  and  their  equally  empty-headed  associ- 
ates. Why  should  they  give  up  the  society 
they  knew  for  the  utter  solitude  of  a  life  on  the 
farm,  or  the  bay? 

I  have  put  some  words  of  Thoreau's  upon 
the  title-page  of  this  book,  and  no  one  who 
has  taken  the  pains  to  dip  into  its  pages  can 
have  failed  to  see  that  I  have  read  the  famous 
hermit  of  Walden  Pond  with  persistency  and 
admiration.  There  has  always  been  to  me 
something  fascinating  about  this  out-door  ideal- 
ist. I  never  have  been,  and  probably  never 
shall  be,  a  sympathizer  with  the  view  which 


1/2  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

makes  Thoreau  a  skulker,  as  Carlyle  calls  him, 
or  a  loafer,  as  most  of  our  typical  American 
business  men,  if  they  know  any  thing  about 
him  at  all,  would  probably  dub  him.  At  the 
same  time,  I  will  confess  that  the  man's  asceti- 
cism has  less  fascination  for  me  than  the  per- 
sistency with  which  he  harps  upon  the  idea 
that  nine  tenths  or  ninety-nine  one-hundredths 
of  our  people  waste  their  time  in  making  money ; 
touch  Thoreau  at  any  point  with  regard  to 
business  policy  or  business  life,  and  he  fairly 
bristles  with  sarcasm  and  jibes.  It  has  been  a 
life-long  wonder  to  me  that  the  man  has  not 
been  valued  more  highly  even  in  this  com- 
munity devoted  to  matters  of  fact,  and  that  so 
few  outside  of  a  narrow  circle  of  writers  and 
thinkers  know  any  thing  about  him.  I  am  con- 
vinced that  the  time  will  come  when  the  name 
of  Henry  David  Thoreau  will  stand  high  in 
American  annals.  He  was  our  first  noted  Prot- 
estant— passionate,  earnest,  persistent,  honest, 
— against  the  sordid  materialism  of  this  coun- 
try. Our  earlier  years  as  a  nation  were  natu- 
rally taken  up  with  hard  material  work,  and  if 
to-day  we  place  work,  as  work,  upon  a  pedestal 
which  it  does  not  deserve,  it  is  due  to  the  heredit- 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  1/3 

ary  warp  of  the  last  one  hundred  years,  when  the 
drawing  of  water  and  the  hewing  of  wood  were 
essential  to  life,  to  say  nothing  of  comfort. 
There  was  certain  to  be  some  energetic  protest 
against  the  narrow  view  of  life  which  all  work 
and  no  play  was  sure  to  produce  in  us  as  a 
people,  and  the  wonder  is  that  Thoreau  stands 
alone  as  a  protestant. 

The  personality  of  the  man  is  so  interesting 
that  I  will  take  the  liberty  of  devoting  a  few 
pages  to  saying  something  of  him,  using  many 
words  and  expressions  which  I  find  in  an  ad- 
mirable little  article  contributed  some  years 
ago  to  the  Cornhill  Magazine,  by  Stevenson. 
"  Thoreau's  thin,  penetrating,  big-nosed  face, 
even  in  a  bad  wood-cut,"  says  this  writer, 
"conveys  some  hint  of  the  limitations  of 
his  mind  and  character.  With  his  almost 
acid  sharpness  of  insight,  with  his  almost 
animal  dexterity  in  action,  there  went  none 
of  that  large,  unconscious  geniality  of  the 
world's  hero.  He  was  not  easy,  or  ample, 
or  urbane,  not  even  kind."  "  He  was  bred 
to  no  profession,"  says  Emerson ;  "  he  never 
married  ;  he  lived  alone,  he  went  to  no  church ; 
he  never  voted,  he  refused  to  pay  a  tax  to 


1/4  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  State ;  he  ate  no  flesh,  he  drank  no  wine, 
he  never  knew  the  use  of  tobacco ;  and 
though  a  naturalist,  he  used  neither  trap  or 
gun.  When  asked  at  dinner  what  dish  he  pre- 
ferred, he  answered,  '  the  nearest.'  "  He  was 
no  ascetic,  rather  an  epicurean  of  the  noblest 
sort.  And  he  had  this  one  great  merit,  that  he 
»„  succeeded  so  far  as  to  be  happy.  He  was  con- 
tent in  living  like  the  plant  he  had  planted  and 
watered  with  solicitude.  For  instance,  he  ex- 
plains his  abstinence  from  tea  and  coffee  by 
saying  that  it  was  bad  economy  and  worthy  of 
no  true  virtuoso  to  spoil  the  natural  rapture  of 
the  morning  with  stimulants ;  let  him  see  the 
sunshine  and  he  was  ready  for  the  labors  of  the 
day.  These  labors  were  partly  to  keep  out  of 
the  way  of  the  world.  His  faculties  were  of  a 
piece  with  his  moral  shyness.  He  could  guide 
himself  about  the  woods  on  the  darkest  night 
by  the  touch  of  his  feet.  He  could  pick  up  an 
exact  dozen  of  pencils  by  feeling ;  pace  dis- 
tances with  accuracy.  His  smell  was  so  dainty 
that  he  could  perceive  the  fcetor  of  dwelling- 
houses  as  he  passed  them  at  night ;  his  palate 
so  unsophisticated  that  like  a  child  he  disliked 
the  taste  of  wine  ;  and  his  knowledge  of  nature 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  1/5 

was  so  complete  and  curious  that  he  could  have 
told  the  time  of  year  within  a  day  or  so  by  the 
aspect  of  the  plants.  There  were  few  things 
that  he  could  not  do.  He  could  make  a  house, 
a  boat,  a  pencil,  or  a  book.  He  was  a  surveyor, 
a  scholar,  a  natural  historian.  He  could  run, 
walk,  climb,  skate,  and  swim,  and  manage  a 
boat.  The  smallest  occasion  served  to  display 
his  physical  accomplishments;  and  a  manufac- 
turer, upon  observing  his  dexterity  with  the 
window  of  a  railway  car,  offered  him  a  situation 
on  the  spot. 

Thoreau  decided  from  the  first  to  live  a  life 
of  self-improvement ;  he  saw  duty  and  inclina- 
tion in  that  direction.  He  had  no  money,  and 
it  was  a  sore  necessity  which  compelled  him  to 
make  money — even  the  little  he  needed.  There 
was  a  love  of  freedom,  a  strain  of  the  wild  man 
in  his  nature  that  rebelled  with  violence  against 
the  yoke  of  custom  ;  he  was  so  eager  to  culti- 
vate himself  and  to  be  happy  in  his  own 
society,  that  he  could  consent  with  difficulty 
even  to  interruptions  of  friendship.  "  Such  are 
my  engagements  to  myself  that  I  dare  not  prom- 
ise," he  once  wrote  in  answer  to  an  invitation ; 
and  the  italics  are  his  own.  Thoreau  is  always 


176  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

careful  of  himself,  and  he  must  think  twice 
about  a  morning  call.  Imagine  him  condemned 
for  eight  hours  a  day  to  some  uncongenial  and 
unmeaning  business.  He  shrank  from  the  very 
look  of  the  mechanical  in  life ;  all  should,  if 
possible,  be  sweetly  spontaneous.  Thus  he 
learned  to  make  lead-pencils,  and  when  he  had 
gained  the  highest  certificate  and  his  friends 
began  to  congratulate  him  on  his  establishment 
in  life,  he  calmly  announced  that  he  should 
never  make  another.  "  Why  should  I,"  said 
he ;  "  I  would  not  do  again  what  I  have  done 
once."  Yet  in  after  years,  when  it  became 
needful  to  support  his  family,  he  turned 
patiently  to  this  mechanical  art.  He  tried 
school-teaching.  "  As  I  did  not  teach  for  the 
benefit  of  my  fellow-men,"  he  says,  "  but  simply 
for  a  livelihood,  this  was  a  failure."  He  tried 
trade  with  the  same  results.  As  I  have  al- 
ready said,  his  contempt  for  business  and  busi- 
ness men  was  utter.  He  says:  "If  our  mer- 
diants  did  not  most  of  them  fail  and  the  banks 
too,  my  faith  in  the  old  rules  of  this  world 
would  be  staggered.  The  statement  that  ninety- 
nine  in  a  hundred  doing  such  business  surely 
break  down  is  perhaps  the  sweetest  fact  that 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  If] 

statistics  have  revealed."  The  wish  was  prob- 
ably father  to  the  figures.  A/»k  *v**^A..  JC~  fy^^i  **, 

"  The  cost  of  a  thing,"  says  Thoreau,  "  is7 
the  amount  of  what  I  will  call  life  which  is 
required  to  be  exchanged  for  it,  immediately  or 
in  the  long  run."  The  idea  may  be  common- 
place, and  yet  most  of  us  will  admit  a  leavening 
of  truth  in  it  while  declining  to  make  an  ex- 
periment. Do  you  want  one  thousand  a  year, 
or  two  thousand  a  year  ?  Do  you  want  ten 
thousand  a  year?  And  can  you  afford  what 
you  want  ?  It  is  a  matter  of  taste,  and  within 
certain  lines  not  in  the  least  a  question  of  duty, 
although  commonly  supposed  to  be  so.  There  is 
no  authority  for  that  view  anywhere.  Thoreau's 
tastes  are  well  defined.  He  loved  to  be  free,  to 
be  master  of  his  times  and  seasons  ;  he  preferred 
long  rambles  to  rich  dinners,  his  own  reflections 
to  the  consideration  of  society,  and  an  easy, 
calm,  unfettered  life  among  green  trees  to  dull 
toiling  at  the  counter  of  a  bank.  And  such 
being  his  inclination,  he  determined  that  he 
would  gratify  it. 

In  1845,  when  twenty-eight  years  old,  an  age 
by  which  the  liveliest  of  us  have  usually  de- 
clined into  some  conformity  with  the  world, 


1/8  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

Thoreau,  with  a  capital  of  less  than  twenty-five 
dollars,  and  a  borrowed  axe,  walked  into  the 
woods  by  Walden  Pond,  and  began  his  experi- 
ment. He  built  himself  a  dwelling,  and  returned 
the  axe,  he  says,  sharper  than  when  he  borrowed 
it ;  he  reclaimed  a  patch  of  ground  where  he 
cultivated  beans,  peas,  potatoes,  and  sweet- 
corn  ;  he  had  his  bread  to  bake,  his  farm  to  dig, 
and  for  six  weeks  in  the  summer  he  worked  as 
surveyor  or  carpenter.  For  more  than  five 
years  this  was  all  that  he  required  to  do  for  his  /<-<£«,  £ 
support.  For  six  weeks  of  occupation,  a  little 
cooking  and  a  little  gentle  hygienic  gardening,^ 
the  man  had  as  good  as  stolen  his  living.  Or  it 
must  rather  be  allowed  that  he  had  done  far 
better;  for  the  thief  himself  was  continually 
and  busily  occupied.  He  says :  "  What  old 
people  tell  you  you  cannot  do,  you  try  and  find 
you  can."  And  his  conclusion  is :  "I  am  con- 
vinced that  to  maintain  one's  self  on  this  earth 
is  not  a  hardship  but  a  pastime  if  we  will  live 
simply  and  wisely ;  the  pursuits  of  simpler 
nations  are  still  the  sports  of  the  more  arti- 
ficial." When  Thoreau  had  had  enough  of 
Walden  Pond,  he  showed  the  same  simplicity 
in  giving  it  up  as  in  beginning.  He  made  no 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  179 

fetish  of  his  scheme,  and  did  what  he  wanted 
squarely.  The  frugality  he  exercised  and  his 
asceticism  are  not  the  notable  points  of  this 
notable  experiment.  The  remarkable  part  of 
it  is  his  recognition  of  the  position  of  money; 
he  had  perceived  and  was  acting  on  a  truth  of 
universal  application.  A  certain  amount  of 
money,  varying  with  the  number  and  extent  of 
our  desires,  is  a  necessity  to  each  one  of  us  in 
the  present  order  of  society ;  but  beyond  that 
amount,  money  is  a  commodity  to  be  bought  or 
not  to  be  bought,  a  luxury  in  which  we  may  in- 
dulge or  stint  ourselves  like  any  other.  And 
there  are  many  luxuries  that  we  may  legiti- 
mately prefer  to  money,  such  as  a  grateful  con- 
science, a  country  life,  or  the  woman  of  our  in- 
clination. Trite,  flat,  and  obvious  as  this 
conclusion  may  appear,  we  have  only  to  look 
around  us  to  see  how  scantily  it  has  been 
recognized ;  and  after  a  little  reflection  perhaps 
we  may  decide  to  spend  a  trifle  less  for  money 
and  indulge  ourselves  a  trifle  more  in  freedom. 
Says  Thoreau  :  "  To  have  done  any  thing  by 
which  you  earned  money  merely,  is  to  be  idle 
and  worse."  There  are  in  his  letters  two  pas- 
sages relating  to  firewood  which  illustrate 


180  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

curiously  the  man's  habits  and  instinct  of 
studying  causes  and  reasons  rather  than  effects. 
He  says :  "  I  suppose  I  have  burned  up  a 
good-sized  tree  to-night — and  for  what?  I 
settled  with  Mr.  Tarbell  for  it  the  other  day ; 
but  that  was  n't  a  final  settlement.  I  got  off 
cheaply  from  him.  At  last  one  will  say :  '  Let 
us  see,  how  much  wood  did  you  burn,  sir?' 
and  I  shall  shudder  to  think  that  the  next 
question  will  be :  '  What  did  you  do  while 
you  were  warm  ?  "  It  is  not  enough  to  have 
earned  our  livelihood.  Either  the  earning 
should  have  been  serviceable  to  mankind  or 
something  else  must  follow.  To  live  is  some- 
times difficult,  but  it  is  never  meritorious  in 
itself,  and  we  must  have  a  reason  to  give  our 
own  conscience  why  we  should  continue  to 
exist  upon  this  earth.  Again  he  says,  speaking 
of  his  wood  :  "  There  is  a  far  more  important 
and  warming  heat,  commonly  lost,  which  pre- 
cedes the  burning  of  the  wood.  It  is  the 
smoke  of  industry,  which  is  incense.  I  had 
been  so  thoroughly  warmed  in  body  and  spirit 
that  when  at  length  my  fuel  was  housed  I 
came  near  selling  it  to  the  ashman  as  if  I  had 
extracted  all  its  heat."  Thus  Thoreau  was  not 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  l8l 

an  idler  by  any  means.  Industry  was  a  passion 
with  him,  but  it  must  be  productive  industry. 
There  is  not  a  day  when  Thoreau  does  not  re- 
cord some  useful  work  in  his  diary.  He  writes, 
he  works  his  garden,  he  chops  down  trees,  he 
helps  others.  The  art  he  loved  was  literature. 
He  believed  in  good  books ;  his  reading  was 
not  particularly  wide,  for  he  hated  libraries  and 
had  not  money  wherewith  to  buy  books.  In 
one  of  his  diaries  he  recalls  his  indisposition  to 
go  to  Cambridge  or  Boston  in  order  to  look 
at  books  in  the  library,  and  he  suggests  that 
libraries  should  be  built  in  the  woods  where 
sensitive  men  might  enjoy  their  contents  with- 
out being  compelled  to  face  the  noise  and  dust 
of  the  towns.  He  wrote  at  all  times ;  in  the 
evening  at  his  desk,  or  during  a  moment's  rest 
upon  a  fallen  log  or  stone.  He  composed  as  he 
walked,  the  length  of  his  walk  making  the 
length  of  his  writing.  When  he  could  not  get 
out-of-doors  during  the  day,  for  one  reason  or 
another,  he  wrote  nothing;  he  said  that  houses 
were  like  hospitals,  and  the  atmosphere  of  them 
enervated  the  mind  as  well  as  the  body.  His 
great  subjects,  the  text  which  he  viewed  on 
all  sides  and  was  always  preaching  from,  was  the 


1 82  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

pursuit  of  self-improvement  even  in  the  face  of 
unfriendly  criticism  as  it  goes  on  in  our  society. 
He  was  a  critic  before  a  naturalist.  His  books, 
such  as  "Walden,"  and  "A  Week  on  the  Con- 
cord," would  be  delightful  studies  of  nature 
even  without  the  touch  of  interest  they  acquire 
at  the  thought  that  the  man  himself  is  preach- 
ing to  an  audience  of  people  who  consider  him 
little  better  than  a  madman.  Unquestionably 
he  was  a  true  lover  of  nature. 

The  quality  which  we  should  call  mystery  in 
a  painting,  and  which  belongs  so  particularly  to 
the  aspect  of  the  external  world  and  to  its  in- 
fluence upon  our  feelings,  was  one  which  he 
was  never  weary  of  attempting  to  reproduce  in 
his  books.  The  significance  of  nature's  ap- 
pearances, their  unchanging  strangeness  to  the 
senses  and  the  thrilling  response  they  awaken 
in  the  mind  of  man  continued  to  surprise  and 
stimulate  his  spirits.  He  writes  to  a  friend : 
"Let  me  suggest  a  theme  for  you — to  state  to 
yourself  precisely  and  completely  what  that 
walk  over  the  mountains  amounted  to  for  you, 
returning  to  this  essay  again  and  again  until 
you  are  satisfied  that  all  that  was  important  in 
your  experience  is  in  it.  Don't  suppose  that 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  183 

you  record  it  precisely  the  first  dozen  times 
you  try,  but  at  'em  again ;  especially  when, 
after  a  sufficient  pause  you  suspect  that  you 
are  touching  the  heart -or  stomach  of  the  mat- 
ter. Reiterate  your  blows  there  and  account 
for  the  mountain  to  yourself.  Not  that  the 
story  need  be  long,  but  it  will  take  a  long  while 
to  make  it  short."  Perhaps  the  most  success- 
ful work  that  Thoreau  accomplished  in  this 
direction  is  to  be  found  in  the  passages  relating 
to  fish  in  the  "  Week."  These  are  remarkable 
for  a  vivid  truth  of  impression  and  a  happy  use 
of  language  not  frequently  surpassed. 

Perhaps  the  very  coldness  and  egoism  of  his 
own  nature  gave  Thoreau  a  clearer  insight  into 
the  intellectual  basis  of  our  warm  mutual  tolera- 
tions grouped  under  the  head  of  friendship  ; 
testimony  to  the  value  of  friendship  comes  with 
added  force  from  one  who  was  solitary  and  dis- 
obliging, and  of  whom  a  friend  remarked  :  "  I 
love  Henry,  but  I  cannot  like  him."  He  made 
scarcely  any  distinction  between  love  and  friend- 
ship. He  was,  indeed,  too  accurate  an  observer 
not  to  remark  that  there  exists  already  a  natu- 
ral disinterestedness  and  liberality  between  men 
and  women  ;  yet  he  thought  friendship  no  re- 


1 84  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

specter  of  sex.  "  We  are  not  what  we  are," 
says  he,  "  nor  do  we  treat  or  esteem  each  other 
for  such  but  for  what  we  are  capable  of  being." 
Again  :  "  It  is  the  merit  and  preservation  of 
friendship  that  it  takes  place  on  a  higher  level 
than  the  actual  characters  of  the  parties  would 
seem  to  warrant.  Is  this  not  light  in  a  dark 
place  ?  We  are  different  with  different  friends  ; 
yet  if  we  look  closer,  we  shall  find  that  every 
such  relation  reposes  on  some  particular  hy- 
pothesis of  one's  self."  Yet  this  analyst  of 
friendship  was  not  friendly  with  many  per- 
sons and  was  intimate  with  none.  Thoreau 
had  no  illusions  ;  he  does  not  give  way  to  love 
any  more  than  to  hatred,  but  preserves  them 
both  with  care,  like  valuable  curiosities.  He  is 
an  egoist  ;  he  does  not  remember  that  in  these 
near  intimacies  we  are  ninety-nine  times  disap- 
pointed in  our  beggarly  selves  for  once  that  we 
are  disappointed  in  our  friends ;  that  it  is  we 
who  seem  most  frequently  undeserving  of  the 
love  that  unites  us.  Thoreau  is  after  profit  in 
these  intimacies ;  moral  profit,  to  be  sure,  but 
still  profit  to  himself.  "  If  you  will  be  the  sort 
of  friend  I  want,"  he  remarks,  "  my  education 
cannot  dispense  with  your  society."  As  though 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  185 

his  friend  were  a  dictionary.  And  with  all  this, 
not  one  word  about  pleasure,  or  laughter,  or 
kisses,  or  any  quality  of  flesh  and  blood.  It 
was  not  inappropriate,  surely,  that  he  had  such 
close  relations  with  the  fishes.  We  can  under- 
stand the  friend  already  quoted  when  he  cried : 
"As  for  taking  his  arm,  I  would  as  soon  think 
of  taking  the  arm  of  an  elm  tree."  It  is  not 
surprising  that  he  experienced  but  a  broken 
enjoyment  in  his  intimacies  ;  he  went  to  see 
his  friends  as  one  might  stroll  in  to  see  a  cricket- 
match — not  simply  for  the  pleasure  of  the 
thing,  but  with  some  afterthought  of  self- 
improvement.  It  was  his  theory  that  people 
saw  each  other  too  frequently  ;  they  had  noth- 
ing fresh  to  communicate  ;  friendship  with  him 
meant  a  society  for  mutual  improvement. 

"  The  only  obligation,"  says  he,  "  which  I 
have  a  right  to  assume  is  to  do  at  any  time 
what  I  think  right."  "  Why  should  we  ever  go 
abroad,  even  across  the  way  to  ask  a  neighbor's 
advice  ?  "  "  There  is  a  nearer  neighbor  within 
who  is  incessantly  telling  us  how  we  should  be- 
have. But  we  wait  for  the  neighbor  without  to 
tell  us  of  some  faults."  "  The  greater  part  of 
what  my  neighbors  call  good  I  believe  in  my 


186  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

soul  to  be  bad."  To  be  what  we  are  and  to  be- 
come what  we  are  capable  of  becoming  is  the  end 
of  life.  It  is  "  when  we  fall  behind  ourselves," 
that  "  we  are  cursed  with  duties  and  the  neglect 
of  duties."  "  I  love  the  wild,"  he  says,  "  not  less 
than  the  good."  The  life  of  a  good  man  will 
hardly  improve  us  more  than  the  life  of  a  free- 
booter, for  the  inevitable  laws  appear  as  plainly 
in  the  infringement  as  in  the  observance,  and 
our  lives  are  sustained  by  a  nearly  equal  expense 
of  virtue  of  some  kind."  "As  for  doing  good," 
he  writes  elsewhere,  "  that  is  one  of  the  profes- 
sions that  are  full.  Moreover,  I  have  tried  it 
fairly,  and,  strange  as  it  may  seem,  am  satisfied 
that  it  does  not  agree  with  my  constitution. 
Probably  I  should  not  conscientiously  and  delib- 
erately forsake  my  particular  calling  to  do  the 
good  which  society  demands  of  me  to  save  the 
universe  from  annihilation  ;  and  I  believe  that 
a  like  but  infinitely  greater  steadfastness  else- 
where is  all  that  preserves  it  now.  If  you  should 
ever  be  betrayed  into  any  of  these  philanthro- 
pies, do  not  let  your  left  hand  know  what  your 
right  hand  does,  for  it  is  not  worth  knowing." 

In  the  case  of  Thoreau  so  great  a  show  of 
doctrine  contrary  to  what  the  world  believed, 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  1 87 

demanded  some  practical  outcome.  If  nothing 
were  to  be  done  but  build  a  shanty  at  Walden 
Pond,  we  have  heard  too  much  of  these  decla- 
rations of  independence.  That  the  man  wrote 
some  books  is  nothing  to  the  purpose,  for  the 
same  has  been  done  in  a  suburban  villa.  That 
he  kept  himself  happy  is  perhaps  a  sufficient 
excuse,  but  it  is  disappointing  to  the  reader. 
We  may  be  unjust,  but  when  a  man  despises 
commerce  and  philanthropy  and  has  views  of 
good  so  soaring  that  he  must  take  himself  apart 
from  mankind  for  their  cultivation,  we  will  not 
rest  content  without  some  striking  act.  And 
it  was  not  Thoreau's  fault  if  he  were  not  mar- 
tyred ;  had  the  occasion  come,  he  would  have 
made  a  noble  ending.  He  made  one  practical 
appearance  on  the  stage  of  affairs,  and  strangely 
characteristic  of  the  man.  It  was  forced  on  him 
by  his  calm  but  radical  opposition  to  negro 
slavery.  "  Voting  for  the  right  is  doing  noth- 
ing for  it,"  he  says  ;  "  it  is  only  expressing 
to  men  feebly  your  desire  that  it  should  pre- 
vail." "  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,"  he  adds, 
"  that  those  who  call  themselves  abolitionists 
should  at  once  effectually  withdraw  their  sup- 
port both  in  person  and  property  from  the  gov- 


188  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

ernment  of  Massachusetts."  This  is  what  he 
did.  In  1843  ne  ceased  to  pay  the  poll  tax.  He 
had  seceded.  He  says:  "  In  fact  I  declare  war 
with  the  State  after  my  own  fashion."  He  was 
put  in  prison,  but  that  was  a  part  of  his  design. 
"  Under  a  government  which  imprisons  any  un- 
justly, the  true  place  for  a  just  man  is  also  in 
prison.  I  know  this  well,  that  if  one  thousand, 
if  one  hundred,  if  ten  men  whom  I  could  name 
— ay,  if  one  honest  man  in  this  State  of  Massa- 
chusetts, ceasing  to  hold  slaves,  were  actually  to 
withdraw  from  this  copartnership  and  be  locked 
up  in  the  county  jail  therefor  it  would  be  the 
abolition  of  slavery  in  America."  A  friend  paid 
the  tax  for  him  and  continued  year  by  year  to 
pay  it,  so  that  Thoreau  was  free  to  walk  the 
woods. 

This  curious  personality  of  Henry  David 
Thoreau  stands  alone,  apparently,  as  a  practical 
attempt  to  grasp  the  good  things  of  this  world, 
in  a  higher  sense,  without  paying  the  penalty 
which  tradition  and  custom  exact.  In  more 
ways  than  in  money  we  constantly  pay  for  the 
privilege  of  living  in  crowds.  To  say  nothing 
of  the  nervous  wear  and  tear,  the  whole  drift  is 
by  association  tending  towards  deterioration. 


THE  LIFE  WORTH  LIVING.  189 

So  long  as  we  continue  to  live  in  crowds 
there  must  be  an  infinite  amount  of  contact 
with  human  nature  which  is  petty,  mean, 
despicable.  We  cannot  escape  from  it.  While 
in  Rome  we  must  do  as  the  Romans.  I  confess 
that  if  my  fellow-man  is  typified  in  the  crowd 
I  see  around  me,  especially  in  large  cities,  I 
detest  my  fellow-man.  It  may  be  the  height 
of  selfishness  for  the  egoist  to  say:  "These 
people  have  nothing  good  to  teach  me;  I  can 
gain  nothing  from  them ;  let  them  keep  to 
themselves  and  allow  me  to  strive  for  some- 
thing higher,  untrammelled  by  their  association, 
or  their  advice."  But  such  a  course  maybe  wise  &.  k"u 
in  order  to  make  the  most  of  what  little  capi-^/^ 
tal  we  have  fallen  heir  to  in  the  shape  of  health, 
intelligence,  and  appreciation  of  things  which  are  ^ 
priceless  in  every  sense,  such  as  the  sunlight 
and  the  color  of  the  clouds.  To  get  rid  of  un- 
pleasant and  seemingly  unprofitable  associa- 
tions Thoreau  cut  loose  from  society  and  buried 
himself  at  Walden.  You  may  call  it  selfish- 
ness, if  you  will,  but  which  is  more  likely  to 
occur :  that  you  will  sink  to  the  level  of  the 
crowd  which  surrounds  you,  or  that,  by  taking 
up  your  cross  and  remaining  at  your  post,  the 


IQO 


LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 


crowd  will  benefit  by  your  self-sacrifices  and 
reflect  one  gleam  of  what  you  may  consider  to 
be  your  superior  light  ?  Is  there  not  egoism  in 
either  course,  perhaps  the  lesser  in  fleeing  from 
the  crowd  and  trying  to  work  out  salvation  for 
one's  self  and  one's  family? 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN. 

"\17HEN  the  prisoners  were  released  from  the 
Bastille  by  the  mob,  it  is  said  that  some 
of  the  old  men  begged  to  be  allowed  to  return 
to  their  cells ;  they  had  become  so  accustomed 
to  darkness  and  confinement  that  they  dreaded 
the  open  air.  The  man  who  can  find  nothing 
but  ennui  in  the  fields  is  an  illustration  of  the 
same  curious  phenomenon — the  loss  of  apprecia- 
tion of  what  is  best  in  life.  For  several  years  I 
have  been  harping  upon  this  theme ;  I  have 
preached  in  season  and  out  of  season,  that  open- 
air  life  is  the  right  one,  and  that  any  man  who 
ties  himself  down  for  eight  or  ten  hours  a  day 
the  year  round  to  a  desk,  is  paying  too  much 
for  the  money  he  earns;  and  I  have  done  this 
without,  so  far  as  I  know,  making  a  single  con- 
vert. I  have  preached  country  life  and  coun- 
try work  until  some  of  my  friends  dread  the 
mention  of  the  subject.  In  the  beginning 
they  argued  the  matter  ;  now  they  laugh,  as  if 
191 


IQ2  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

to  say  that  I  have  become  so  infatuated  with 
my  hobby  as  to  have  lost  all  sense  of  propor- 
tion. I  never  expected  to  make  a  convert ;  in 
fact,  I  should  feel  rather  uncomfortable  if  any 
friend  of  mine  should  desert  his  desk  and  take 
to  the  garden  for  a  living  upon  my  advice. 
So  that  I  have  not  been  disappointed.  At  the 
same  time,  I  have  discovered  nothing  to  make 
me  doubt  the  soundness  of  my  position.  I 
listen  to  ridicule  and  argument,  endeavoring  to 
give  due  weight  to  what  I  hear.  The  chief 
reasons  why  this  desertion  of  the  town  is  de- 
nounced as  folly  may  be  summed  up  as  follows : 
(i)  The  loneliness  of  the  country  will  become 
oppressive ;  (2)  it  will  be  impossible  to  give  my 
family  more  than  the  comforts  of  a  workman's 
home — our  living  will  be  plain,  our  clothes  will 
be  unfashionable,  our  rich  neighbors  will  not 
call  upon  us;  (3)  the  children  will  grow  up  no 
better  than  farmers'  children  ;  (4)  in  the  end 
there  will  be  a  return  to  town  to  take  up  the 
old  life  under  conditions  of  greater  hardship 
than  ever,  years  of  absence  having  broken  con- 
nections that  might  have  become  profitable 
with  time ;  (5)  to  leave  town  for  good,  or  prac- 
tically for  good,  is  unfair  to  my  wife  and  chil- 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN.    193 

dren,  even  if  I  do  find  pleasure  and  profit 
myself  in  such  a  step.  It  is  implied  that  life 
without  new  bonnets  is  not  worth  living  to  a 
woman,  and  that  children  may  grow  up  to  be 
young  savages.  In  the  following  pages  I  try 
to  answer  these  objections.  Whether  or  not  I 
succeed  in  convincing  any  one,  I  am  sure  that 
they  rest  upon  a  wholly  false  estimate  of  the 
value  of  city  life  and  upon  the  equally  false 
notion  to  the  effect  that  intellectual  growth 
cannot  take  place  far  from  great  cities.  One  of 
my  acquaintances  to  whom  I  announced  one 
day  that  I  hoped  never  again  to  spend  more 
than  ten  weeks  of  the  year  in  the  city,  said  to 
me :  "  How  do  you  get  on  without  society  ? 
In  summer  you  may  have  city  friends  glad  to 
share  your  bluefish  and  honey  for  a  few  weeks, 
but  the  rest  of  the  year — before  July  and  after 
September — it  must  be  lonely  enough  to  drive 
you  crazy." 

So  I  must  hear  the  talk  of  the  town  in  order 
to  be  happy  ?  Seriously,  I  do  not  believe  that 
from  one  end  of  the  week  to  the  other  passed 
in  the  very  heart  of  the  city's  turmoil,  working 
for  many  hours  in  a  busy  newspaper  office — 
the  very  place  where  interesting  talk  is  sup- 


194  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

posed  to  centre — visiting  a  club  or  two,  going 
to  the  theatre  and  to  the  opera  several  times — 
I  do  not  believe  that  in  this  busy  week  I  hear 
enough  interesting  talk  to  compensate  me  for 
the  loss  of  one  hour  in  my  orchard  or  on  the 
bay.  You  cannot  get  out  of  people  what  is 
not  in  them.  You  cannot  expect  the  success- 
ful dealer  in  butter,  sugar,  or  candle-grease 
to  tell  you  any  thing  you  do  not  know,  unless 
it  is  about  things  he  buys  and  sells,  and  I  am 
not  interested  in  these  things.  Of  all  the  dreary 
stuff  with  which  our  dreary  newspapers  are 
filled,  by  all  odds  the  most  dreary  to  me  con- 
sists of  the  reproductions  of  the  talk  of  these 
good  people.  The  personal-gossip  column, 
which  of  late  years  has  grown  to  great  lengths 
— millionaire  A's  explanation  of  the  recent  rise 
in  the  price  of  leather,  Senator  B's  reason's  for 
believing  that  Coroner  Jones  will  again  be 
elected  this  year,  are  matters  that  do  not  inter- 
est me  in  the  least.  An  ocean  of  gabble 
which  to-day  appears  to  hide  the  paucity  of 
ideas  among  us  has  broken  into  the  newspapers. 
The  exaggeration  of  trifles  is  one  of  the  dis- 
eases of  the  age.  The  instructions  given  to 
our  reporters  seem  to  be  to  question  the  boot- 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN.    195 

black  who  blacks  their  shoes,  the  washerwoman 
who  brings  home  their  shirts,  and  the  President 
of  the  United  States,  if  they  are  lucky  enough 
to  meet  him,  printing  all  that  the  washerwoman, 
the  boot-black,  and  the  President,  may  have  to 
say  about  their  respective  businesses.  The 
stuff  is  ground  over  and  over  again.  Nothing 
interesting  can  come  from  people  who  have  no 
ideas,  and  ideas  do  not  come  by  dint  of  gabble. 
Silence  is  golden.  In  my  orchard  there  is 
silence.  I  have  always  admired  Webster's  reply 
to  a  barber,  who  asked  him  how  he  wished  to 
be  shaved.  "  In  silence,"  replied  the  great  man. 
I  suppose  that  I  am  told  a  dozen  times  a  day 
by  different  persons  that  it  is  a  fine  day,  or  a 
wet  day,  or  that  it  was  cold  yesterday,  or  will 
rain  to-morrow.  The  boy  who  opens  the  door 
for  me  as  I  leave  my  house  gives  me  his  opin- 
ion as  to  the  weather,  the  man  who  runs  the 
elevator  downtown  does  the  same  thing,  the 
waiter  who  brings  me  some  luncheon  gives  me 
his  views  on  the  weather,  past,  present,  and 
future,  and  as  I  ride  home  the  conductor,  if  he 
finds  time,  tells  me  what  kind  of  weather  we  are 
having.  At  the  risk  of  seeming  crusty  to  a 
degree  I  will  confess  that  I  care  for  no  man's 


196  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

opinion  about  the  weather,  unless  it  is  the  gov- 
ernment expert's,  and  not  much  for  his. 

It  is  assumed  that  in  town  one  meets  with 
people  who  have  ideas — authors,  writers,  think- 
ers, men  of  science,  whose  words  are  full  of  in- 
spiration. Perhaps  I  have  been  rather  fortunate 
in  meeting  with  people  whose  names  are  heard 
frequently.  Yet  I  cannot  say  that  the  loss  of 
such  opportunities  as  I  have  enjoyed  in  this 
respect  ever  worries  me.  Take  the  authors  and 
the  writers,  for  instance.  The  man  who  has 
time  and  leisure  may  occasionally,  if  he  likes* 
that  sort  of  thing,  meet  the  author  whose  nov- 
els are  most  read  at  the  moment.  But  it  is 
extremely  doubtful  whether  this  gentleman  will 
talk  half  so  well  in  the  drawing-room  as  he  does 
in  his  book.  These  authors  are  devoting  the 
best  part  of  their  lives  to  thinking  of  something 
brilliant  wherewith  to  amuse  me ;  they  polish 
their  work,  going  over  it  scores  of  times,  finally 
presenting  it  to  me  nicely  printed  and  illus- 
trated, if  necessary.  And  I  may  listen  as  long 
or  as  little  as  I  like  to  what  they  may  have  to 
say.  In  days  when  there  were  no  such  thing 
as  cheap  printing  and  magazines,  I  suppose  that 
the  talk  of  the  town  was  essential  to  many  peo- 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN.    197 

pie.  To-day,  the  author  who  has  a  clever  idea 
sells  it.  The  very  dependence  upon  gossip  for 
ideas  betrays  lack  of  reading.  When  for  a  few 
cents  we  can  buy  the  results  of  the  best  think- 
ing of  our  best  writers,  why  should  we  run 
after  the  writers  themselves?  Of  course  I  am 
not  talking  about  what  men  of  high  position  in 
the  literary  world  or  the  social  world  may  be 
able  to  get  out  of  the  life  of  cities  ;  I  am  speak- 
ing of  what  the  poor  man,  hard  driven  to  earn 
the  few  thousand  dollars  a  year  needed  to  keep 


his  children  in  bread  and  butter,  will  probably, 
judging  by  my  own  experience  and  that  of 
some  of  my  friends,  be  able  to  think  of  as  a 
possible  loss  in  considering  the  advisability  of 
deserting  the  city  for  the  country. 

I  am  not  sure  but  that  we  enjoy  the  work  of 
some  men  all  the  better  because  we  do  not 
know  them  personally.  At  a  distance  they  are 
heroes,  more  or  less.  I  have  heard  some  peo- 
ple say  that  their  enjoyment  in  the  magic  of 
Richard  Wagner's  works  would  be  unquestion- 
ably deepened  had  they  not  had  the  misfortune 
to  meet  the  man  himself — a  great  genius 
who  was  utterly  indifferent  to  what  people 
thought  of  him,  and  utterly  careless  of  the 


198  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

wounds  he  inflicted.  I  esteem  it  rather  a  piece 
of  good  fortune  that  I  never  saw  the  greatest 
musician  that  the  world  has  ever  seen  or  prob- 
ably will  see  for  generations  to  come.  The 
personality  of  the  man  was  not  a  pleasant  one, 
and  I  believe  that  I  am  justified  in  saying  this, 
notwithstanding  some  attempts  to  make  out  a 
different  case.  A  famous  Leipsic  lawyer,  a 
Jew,  has  in  his  study  a  marble  bust  of  Wagner, 
with  a  wreath  of  laurel  on  its  brow  and  a  rope 
around  its  neck.  "  The  one,"  he  says  to  visit- 
ors, "  shows  what  I  think  of  the  composer,  the 
other  what  I  think  of  the  man."  And  the  Jews 
are  not  alone  in  their  detestation  of  the  man, 
while  confessing  to  an  unlimited  admiration  for 
the  musician.  His  pamphlets  againsts  the  Jew 
in  music,  his  caricatures  of  the  French  in  de- 
feat, were  only  a  small  part  of  the  offensive, 
wounding  things  that  Wagner  allowed  himself 
to  utter.  The  anecdotes  of  the  man's  arro- 
gance are  many.  I  know  of  one  young  Amer- 
ican who  would  enjoy  Wagner's  music  more 
had  he  never  attempted  to  interview  the  com- 
poser of  "  Tristan."  This  particular  enthusiast 
had  been  sent  by  one  of  our  newspapers  to 
Bayreuth  for  the  express  purpose  of  telling 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.    199 

Wagner  how  much  the  great  world  of  America 
delighted  in  the  master's  works,  and  to  get  from 
him  some  sort  of  pleasant  acknowledgment,  if 
possible,  of  the  courtesy.  The  scribe  arrived 
in  Bayreuth  and  wasted  a  score  of  cards  and 
letters  without  obtaining  the  promise  of  an  in- 
terview. The  situation  was  becoming  desperate 
— his  newspaper  wanted  an  interview.  The 
young  man  learned  that  Wagner  was  accus- 
tomed to  stroll  every  morning  in  a  certain  wood 
soon  after  sunrise.  He  waylaid  the  composer 
and  found  him  seated  upon  a  bench.  Now 
Wagner  did  not  love  newspapers  or  newspaper 
men,  and  he  had  good  reason.  But  surely  an 
exception  might  be  made  in  favor  of  America. 
There  he  had  not  been  attacked  or  ridiculed  by 
newspaper  men,  for  the  very  good  reason  that 
his  name  was  scarcely  known,  to  say  nothing 
of  his  music.  The  interviewer  made  a  bold 
attack.  Mustering  up  his  best  German,  he  be- 
gan his  address,  Wagner  gazing  dreamily  at 
him  and  not  moving  a  muscle :  "  I  am  commis- 
sioned by  a  great  newspaper  of  that  great  Re- 
public over  the  seas,  where  your  music  is  already 
a  household  word  (!),  to  tell  you  of  the  deep 
admiration  that  exists  for  you  there,  and  to  ask 


200  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

you  for  some  words  of  greeting  in  return."  Not 
a  word  did  the  great  man  vouch  in  reply.  Per- 
haps he  failed  to  catch  my  meaning,  thought 
the  young  man  ;  and  so  he  repeated  his  little 
speech.  Then  Wagner  pointed  towards  the 
gates  of  the  park,  muttering  a  few  German 
words,  a  free  but  fair  translation  of  which  might 
be — "  Get  out !  "  While  this  was  not  the  sort 
of  interview  which  had  been  hoped  for,  it  did  not 
prevent  the  interviewer  from  making  a  column 
talk  with  Wagner,  in  which  the  composer  was 
made  to  bubble  over  with  gratitude  to  America 
and  Americans.  Those  in  the  secret  knew  that 
the  interview  upon  Wagner's  part  consisted  of 
but  two  words.  I  am  not  defending  the  insti- 
tution of  interviewing,  and  I  do  not  doubt  that 
Wagner  may  have  had  excellent  reasons  for  ob- 
jecting to  such  an  intrusion ;  the  world  may 
have  lost  some  musical  thought  of  the  utmost 
beauty  by  the  enterprise,  so-called,  of  this 
American  ;  I  am  simply  giving  an  illustration 
of  what  may  be  lost  by  too  near  a  view  of  a 
great  man. 

The  art  of  writing  most  beautifully  upon 
charity  may  exist  in  a  man  whose  life  knows 
not  a  charitable  instinct  or  act.  The  man  who 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.  2OI 

can  talk  and  write  exquisitely  about  love  tow- 
ards one's  neighbor  may  be  conspicuous  for  a 
vile  temper  at  home.  The  novelist  who  de- 
lights me  in  print  may,  and  probably  will,  dis- 
appoint me  in  person.  Upon  the  whole,  while 
I  can  look  back  to  some  pleasure  derived  from 
the  talk  of  men  whose  writings  are  famous,  I 
doubt  whether  the  disappointments  do  not 
outweigh  the  pleasures.  Certainly  the  satisfac- 
tion which  I  have  found  in  meeting  persons  who 
write  well  has  been  infinitesimal  as  compared 
with  the  pleasure  which  these  same  persons  have 
given  me  by  their  books.  As  to  the  so-called 
literary  evenings  of  great  cities — occasions 
upon  which  some  person  in  public  view  at  the 
moment  is  placed  upon  exhibition  by  Mrs.  Leo 
Hunter,  I  know  of  few  less  dreary  ways  of  wast- 
ing precious  time. 

I  presume  that  in  this  matter  of  house, 
grounds,  clothes,  and  other  signs  of  outward 
luxury,  the  fact  that  poverty  is  considered  sy- 
nonymous with  inferiority  is  primarily  due  to 
simple  causes.  I  wear  a  patched  coat ;  there- 
fore I  have  no  money  wherewith  to  buy  a  new 
one.  The  absence  of  money  implies  inability 
to  earn  money ;  therefore  I  am  not  so  energetic 


2O2  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

or  so  clever  as  some  of  my  fellow-men  who  earn 
more  money  and  wear  good  coats.  In  a  coun- 
try where  the  measure  of  a  man  is  the  amount 
of  money  or  property  that  he  has  been  able  to 
acquire,  either  through  industry  or  luck  in  gam- 
bling, it  is  inevitable  that  the  money  stand- 
ard, or  the  coat  standard,  should  acquire  the 
weight  of  a  moral  law.  The  man  who  wears  a 
patched  coat  and  only  wears  gloves  when  the 
weather  makes  the  gloves  a  physical  comfort, 
must  be  an  inferior  sort  of  man,  because  he  has 
evidently  not  kept  pace  with  his  fellows  in  the 
race.  In  the  Old  World  the  struggle  for  money 
and  material  prosperity  has  not  been  so  exhaust- 
ing these  last  few  hundred  years,  and  has  not 
excluded  spiritual  things  so  completely  as  with 
us  ;  and  there  we  find,  in  consequence,  that  the 
outward  signs  of  the  ability  to  earn  money  are 
not  deemed  so  essential  to  the  fixing  of  a  man's 
standing  in  the  community.  To  wear  a  patched 
coat  and  to  work  with  one's  hands  in  a  garden, 
do  not  in  themselves  stamp  a  man  in  France 
and  England  as  an  inferior  person.  I  was  par- 
ticularly impressed  with  this  when  some  years 
ago  an  English  clergyman — a  man  of  much  cul- 
ture and  reading — gave  up  his  cure  in  a  fashion- 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.   2O3 

able  summer  resort  not  a  thousand  miles  from 
New  York,  because  he  found  that  his  love  of 
working  his  own  garden  was  looked  upon  with 
surprise,  to  use  no  stronger  term,  and  he  was 
made  to  feel  that  his  parishioners  considered  the 
dignity  of  their  church  endangered  by  their 
pastor's  curious  fancy  for  digging.  In  England 
it  had  been  his  custom  to  raise  his  own  vegeta- 
bles. Here  it  was  not  thought  dignified  for  the 
pastor  to  work  like  a  common  laborer,  hang- 
ing his  coat  on  a  bramble  bush,  and  one  of  his 
vestry-men  hinted  that  the  church  might  be 
able  to  squeeze  out  enough  money  to  provide  a 
gardener  for  the  pastor.  The  pastor  did  not 
want  a  gardener,  and  he  gave  way  to  some  one 
else  who  would  keep  his  coat  on  and  his  hands 
clean.  It  may  be  said  that  instead  of  resign- 
ing his  place,  this  victim  of  the  Philistines 
should  have  preached  a  few  sermons  upon  the 
dignity  of  manual  labor,  recalling  the  fact  that 
Christ  was  a  carpenter;  but  the  depth  of  such 
prejudice  is  beyond  the  plummet  of  argument. 
The  commonplace  mind  is  never  tolerant  of 
other  views.  For  years  manual  labor,  because  it 
does  not  bring  in  much  money,  has  been  looked 
upon  as  the  work  of  the  inferior  man  ;  the  am- 


2O4  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

bition  of  every  one  has  been  to  get  away  from 
it.  The  farmer's  son  deserts  the  farm  ;  the  car- 
penter's son  leaves  the  bench  ;  any  occupation 
which  allows  a  man  to  wear  a  coat  and  keep  his 
hands  white  is  considered  better  than  manual 
labor.  It  is  commonly  considered  that  of  all 
the  occupations  farming  pays  the  least  money 
in  proportion  to  the  care  and  labor  expended. 
Therefore  farming  and  gardening  must  be  the 
last  occupation  that  a  man  of  parts  will  take 
up.  To  devote  hours  to  digging  or  gardening 
or  any  work  which  a  laborer  at  a  dollar  a  day  will 
accomplish  as  well,  is  considered  folly  when  a  dol- 
lar an  hour  can  be  earned  at  other  work.  If  the 
accumulation  of  money  is  the  end  of  life,  I  sup- 
pose that  public  opinion  is  right ;  but  even  upon 
this  point  it  may  be  doubted  whether  or  not  in 
the  long  run  the  man  who  acquires  sound  health 
by  systematic  out-door  work  does  not  stand  a 
better  chance  in  the  race  for  money  than  nine 
tenths  of  his  fellow-men. 

Dress  is  not  an  art  founded  upon  fixed  princi- 
ples of  beauty.  What  one  generation  admires 
the  next  will  ridicule.  Perhaps  the  time  will 
come  when  patches  will  be  in  fashion.  We 
already  find  it  possible  to  admire  Oriental  rugs 


WHA  T  WE  LOSE  AND  WHA  T  WE   GAIN.   20$ 

in  tatters,  and  vast  sums  are  paid  for  bits  of 
Persian  carpets  about  to  fall  in  pieces.  Does 
not  every  one  know  that  should  the  Prince  of 
Wales  appear  in  public  with  a  shabby  coat  and 
a  patch  upon  both  knees,  that  patches  would 
appear  upon  every  fashionable  knee,  and  that 
unpatched  trousers  would  be  viewed  with  sus- 
picion ?  There  are  no  end  of  stories  which 
illustrate  how  strongly  the  traits  of  our  simian 
ancestors  are  marked  in  us.  Some  years  ago 
the  Prince  of  Wales  could  not  find  the  over- 
coat he  wanted  when  about  to  leave  for  the 
opera  one  evening,  and  picked  up  a  rough 
shooting-jacket  he  had  brought  from  the  High- 
lands ;  result :  ulsters  appeared  all  over  the 
world.  More  recently,  the  same  leader  of  fash- 
ion dropped  one  glove  in  the  street  and  put 
on  another  of  a  different  color;  result :  people 
begin  to  wear  gloves  that  do  not  match.  The 
Prince  of  Wales  is  growing  bald  ;  result :  the 
sale  of  magic  hair-growers  has  fallen  off  by  two 
thirds  in  the  United  Kingdom.  The  traces  of 
the  monkey  are  to  be  seen  all  around  us.  Not 
one  man  in  a  thousand  knows  that  the  two 
buttons  to  be  found  upon  the  backs  of  most 
coats  date  from  the  time  when  men  needed 


206  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

these  buttons  to  hold  on  their  sword-belts. 
The  swords  have  gone,  but  we  continue  to  in- 
sist upon  the  buttons  because  "  everybody 
wears  them."  The  necktie  once  held  the  shirt 
together  at  the  throat,  and  thus  served  a  useful 
purpose.  Buttons  now  fill  the  office,  but  the 
tie  survives,  and  the  man  who  goes  without  a 
necktie  is  held  up  to  scorn.  A  score  of  such 
customs  which  have  now  no  other  warrant  than 
that  "  every  one  else  does  so  "  might  be  given. 
Yet  it  is  more  difficult  to  teach  a  boy  the  neces- 
sity of  truth  than  the  folly  of  too  much  atten- 
tion to  his  clothes.  As  things  go  there  is  a 
reason  in  the  present  insistance  upon  fine 
feathers  ;  the  man  who  wishes  to  be  well  paid 
must  make  people  believe  that  he  is  worth 
large  pay  and  that  other  people  think  so.  If 
he  is  richly  dressed,  it  is  a  sign  that  his  services 
have  been  considered  worthy  of  a  rich  reward. 
"  It  pays  to  dress  well,"  has  become  a  maxim 
with  us,  and  there  is  reason  behind  it.  It  does 
pay — in  money.  But  we  must  take  care  that 
we  do  not  pay  too  much  for  that  money. 

The  matter  of  clothes  has  been  suggested  as 
offering  possible  obstacles  to  a  life  without 
money,  and  the  topic  has  been  treated  so  fully, 


WHA  T  WE  LOSE  AND  WHA  T  WE   GAIN.   2O? 

and  so  much  better  by  Thoreau  than  I  can 
hope  to  treat  it,  that  I  will  venture  to  quote  at 
length  from  his  "  Walden."  It  is  begging  the 
question  to  assume  that  because  one  may 
attempt  to  get  a  great  deal  of  life  out  of  com- 
paratively few  dollars,  the  result  will  be  rags 
for  the  family.  Thoreau  is  eloquent  upon  the 
subject  of  patches,  and  could  see  nothing  to  be 
ashamed  of  in  them.  Since  his  day  the  matter 
has  been  largely  simplified  for  the  weaklings 
who  do  not  like  to  excite  comment  even  of 
people  who  have  never  pondered  upon  the 
beauty  of  patches.  Clothing,  and  every  other 
commodity  which  is  largely  made  by  machinery 
has  been  cheapened  in  proportion  to  the  part 
of  the  work  performed  by  machinery,  and  every 
year  this  part  grows  larger  and  larger.  Conse- 
quently, the  amount  of  clothing  which  can  be 
bought  for  a  day's  labor  is  six  or  seven  times 
as  great  as  it  was  one  hundred  years  ago,  and 
three  or  four  times  as  great  as  when  the  hermit 
of  "  Walden  "  jotted  down  sarcastic  notes  about 
the  man  who  was  not  ashamed  of  going  around 
with  a  broken  leg,  but  very  much  ashamed  of 
a  broken  pair  of  trousers.  This  process  is  go- 
ing on  so  steadily  that  it  is  easy  to  foresee  the 


208  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

...  day  when  a  few  days'  work  upon  the  part  of 
the  laborer  or  mechanic  will  be  sufficient  to 
provide  himself  and  his  family  with  unpatched 

'^and  well-made  clothing  for  the  year.     I  have  a 
"   prejudice  against  patches  to  the  extent  of  dislik- 
ing any  thing  that  will  attract  the  attention  of 
•W    Tom,  Dick,  and  Harry,  and  their  female  counter- 

^  parts.  If  for  a  few  dollars  spent  in  clothing 
which  is  whole  I  can  save  myself  from  their 
attentions,  it  is  money  well  spent,  and  the  same 
thing  holds  good  with  regard  to  the  clothing 
of  my  wife  and  children.  We  might  spend  a 
few  dollars  less  every  year  upon  bonnets  and 
dresses,  but  the  question  is  :  Would  it  pay  ?  We 
are  not  living  in  the  woods,  and  our  desire 
is  to  avoid  attracting  attention. 

To  go  back  to  Thoreau,  he  says  in  "  Walden  "  : 

"  As  for  clothing,  to  come  at  once  to  the 
practical  part  of  the  question,  perhaps  we  are 
led  oftener  by  the  love  of  novelty,  and  a  regard 
for  the  opinions  of  men  in  procuring  it  than  by 
a  true  utility.  Let  him  who  has  work  to  do 
recollect  that  the  object  of  clothing  is,  first,  to 
retain  the  vital  heat,  and,  secondly,  in  this  state 
of  society,  to  cover  nakedness,  and  he  may 
judge  how  much  of  any  necessary  or  important 
work  may  be  accomplished  without  adding  to 


WHA  T  WE  LOSE  AND  WHA  T  WE   GAIN.  2OO, 

his  wardrobe.  Kings  and  queens  who  wear  a 
suit  but  once,  though  made  by  some  tailor  or 
dressmaker  to  their  majesties,  cannot  know  the 
comfort  of  wearing  a  suit  that  fits.  They  are  no 
better  than  wooden  horses  to  hang  the  clean 
clothes  on.  Every  day  our  garments  become 
more  assimilated  to  ourselves,  receiving  the  im- 
press of  the  wearer's  character,  until  we  hesitate 
to  lay  them  aside,  without  such  delay  and  medi- 
cal appliances  and  some  such  solemnity  even  as 
our  bodies.  No  man  ever  stood  the  lower  in 
my  estimation  for  having  a  patch  in  his  clothes, 
yet  I  am  sure  that  there  is  greater  anxiety, 
commonly,  to  have  fashionable,  or  at  least  clean 
and  unpatched  clothes,  than  to  have  a  sound 
conscience.  But  even  if  the  rent  is  not  mended, 
perhaps  the  worst  vice  betrayed  is  improvidence. 
I  sometimes  try  my  acquaintances  by  such  tests 
as  this :  Who  would  wear  a  patch,  or  two  extra 
seams  only,  over  the  knee?  Most  behaved  as 
if  they  believed  that  their  prospects  for  life 
would  be  ruined  if  they  should  do  it.  It  would 
be  easier  for  them  to  hobble  to  town  with  a 
broken  leg  than  with  a  broken  pantaloon.  Often 
if  an  accident  happens  to  a  gentleman's  legs, 
they  can  be  mended,  but  if  a  similar  accident 
happens  to  the  legs  of  his  pantaloons  there  is 
no  help  for  it,  for  he  considers  not  what  is  truly 
respectable  but  what  is  respected.  We  know 
but  few  men,  a  great  many  coats  and  breeches. 
Dress  a  scarecrow  in  your  last  shift,  you  stand- 


2IO  LIBERTY  AND  A    LIVING. 

ing  shiftless  by,  who  would  not  soonest  salute 
the  scarecrow?  Passing  a  cornfield  the  other 
day  close  by  a  hat  and  coat  on  a  stake,  I  recog- 
nized the  owner  of  the  farm.  He  was  only  a 
little  more  weather-beaten  than  when  I  saw  him 
last.  I  have  heard  of  a  dog  that  barked  at 
every  stranger  who  approached  his  master's 
premises  with  clothes  on,  but  was  easily  quieted 
by  a  naked  thief.  It  is  an  interesting  question 
how  far  men  would  retain  their  relative  rank  if 
they  were  divested  of  their  clothes.  Could  you 
in  such  a  case  tell  surely  of  any  company  of 
civilized  men  which  belonged  to  the  most  re- 
spected class?  When  Madame  Pfeiffer,  in  her 
adventurous  travels  round  the  world  from  east 
to  west,  had  got  so  near  home  as  Asiatic  Russia 
she  says  she  felt  the  necessity  of  wearing  other 
than  a  travelling  dress  when  she  went  to  meet 
the  authorities,  for  she  '  was  now  in  a  civilized 
country  where  people  are  judged  of  by  their 
clothes  ! '  Even  in  our  democratic  New  Eng- 
land towns  the  accidental  possession  of  wealth 
and  its  manifestation  in  dress  and  equipage 
alone  obtain  for  the  possessor  almost  universal 
respect.  But  they  who  yield  such  respect, 
numerous  as  they  are,  are  so  far  heathen,  and 
need  to  have  a  missionary  sent  to  them. 

"  A  man  who  has  at  length  found  something 
to  do  will  not  need  to  get  a  new  suit  to  do  it 
in ;  for  him  the  old  will  do,  that  has  lain  dusty 
in  the  garret  for  an  indeterminate  period.  Old 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE  GAIN.  211 

shoes  will  serve  a  hero  longer  than  they  have 
served  his  valet — if  a  hero  ever  has  a  valet ; — 
bare  feet  are  older  than  shoes,  and  he  can  make 
them  do.  Only  they  who  go  to  soirees  and 
legislative  halls  must  have  new  coats,  coats  to 
change  as  often  as  the  man  changes  in  them. 
But  if  my  jacket  and  trousers,  my  hat  and 
shoes,  are  fit  to  worship  God  in,  they  will  do, 
will  they  not  ?  Who  ever  saw  his  old  clothes, 
his  old  coat  actually  worn  out,  resolved  into  its 
primitive  elements,  so  that  it  was  not  a  deed  of 
charity  to  bestow  it  on  some  poor  boy,  by  him, 
perchance,  to  be  bestowed  on  one  poorer  still, 
or  shall  we  say  richer,  who  could  do  with  less? 
I  say  beware  of  all  enterprises  that  require  new 
clothes  and  not  rather  a  new  wearer  of  clothes. 
If  there  is  not  a  new  man,  how  can  the  new 
clothes  be  made  to  fit  ?  If  you  have  any  enter- 
prise before  you,  try  it  in  your  old  clothes.  All 
men  want  not  something  to  do  with,  but  some- 
thing to  do,  or  rather  something  to  be.  Per- 
haps we  should  never  procure  a  new  suit,  how- 
ever dirty  or  ragged  the  old,  until  we  have  so 
conducted,  so  enterprised  or  sailed  in  some 
way,  that  we  feel  like  new  men  in  the  old,  and 
that  to  retain  it  would  be  like  keeping  new 
wine  in  old  bottles.  Our  moulting  season,  like 
that  of  the  fowls,  must  be  a  crisis  in  our  lives. 
The  loon  retires  to  solitary  ponds  to  spend  it. 
Thus,  also,  the  snake  casts  its  slough,  and  the 
caterpillar  its  wormy  coat,  by  an  internal  indus- 


212  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

try  and  expansion  ;  for  clothes  are  but  our  out- 
most cuticle  and  mortal  coil.  Otherwise  we 
shall  be  found  sailing  under  false  colors,  and  be 
inevitably  cashiered  at  last  by  our  own  opinion 
as  well  as  that  of  mankind. 

"  When  I  ask  for  a  garment  of  a  particular 
form,  my  tailoress  tells  me  gravely  :  '  They  do 
not  make  them  so  now,'  not  emphasizing  the 
'  They  '  at  all,  as  if  she  quoted  an  authority  as 
impersonal  as  the  Fates,  and  I  find  it  difficult 
to  get  made  what  I  want,  simply  because  she 
cannot  believe  that  I  mean  what  I  say — that  I 
am  so  rash.  When  I  hear  this  oracular  sen- 
tence, I  am  for  a  moment  absorbed  in  thought, 
emphasizing  to  myself  each  word  separately 
that  I  may  come  at  the  meaning  of  it,  that 
I  may  find  out  by  what  degree  of  consanguinity 
'  They  '  are  related  to  me,  and  what  authority 
they  may  have  in  an  affair  which  affects  me  so 
nearly ;  and,  finally,  I  am  inclined  to  answer 
her  with  equal  mystery,  and  without  any  more 
emphasis  on  the  '  They/  It  is  true  they  did 
not  make  them  so  recently,  but  they  do  so 
now.  We  worship  not  the  Graces,  nor  the 
Parcae,  but  Fashion.  She  spins  and  weaves 
and  cuts  with  full  authority.  The  head  mon- 
key at  Paris  puts  on  a  traveller's  cap,  and  all 
the  monkeys  in  America  do  the  same.  I  some- 
times despair  of  getting  any  thing  quite  simple 
and  honest  done  in  this  world  by  the  help  of 
men.  They  would  have  to  be  passed  through 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.   21$ 

a  powerful  press  first,  to  squeeze  their  old  no- 
tions out  of  them,  so  that  they  would  not  soon 
get  upon  their  legs  again,  and  then  there  would 
be  some  one  in  the  company  with  a  maggot  in 
his  head,  hatched  from  an  egg  deposited  there 
nobody  knows  when,  for  not  even  fire  kills 
these  things,  and  you  would  have  lost  your 
labor. 

"  On  the  whole,  I  think  that  it  cannot  be 
maintained  that  dressing  has  in  this  or  any 
other  country  risen  to  the  dignity  of  an  art. 
At  present  men  make  shift  to  wear  what  they 
can  get.  Like  shipwrecked  sailors  they  put  on 
what  they  can  find  on  the  beach,  and  at  a  little 
distance,  whether  of  space  or  time,  laugh  at 
each  other's  masquerade.  Every  generation 
laughs  at  the  old  fashions,  but  follows  reli- 
giously the  new.  We  are  amused  at  beholding 
the  costume  of  Henry  VIII.,  or  Queen  Eliza- 
beth, as  much  as  if  it  was  that  of  the  King  and 
Queen  of  the  Cannibal  Islands.  All  costume 
off  a  man  is  pitiful  or  grotesque.  It  is  only  the 
serious  eye  peering  from  and  the  sincere  life 
passed  within  it  which  restrain  laughter  and 
consecrate  the  costume  of  any  people.  Let 
Harlequin  be  taken  with  a  fit  of  the  colic,  and 
the  trappings  will  have  to  serve  that  mood  too. 
When  the  soldier  is  hit  by  a  cannon-ball,  rags 
are  as  becoming  as  purple.  The  childish  and 
savage  taste  of  men  and  women  for  new  pat- 
terns keeps  how  many  shaking  and  squinting 


214  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

through  kaleidoscopes  that  they  may  discover 
the  particular  figure  which  this  generation  re- 
quires to-day." 

In  writing  of  clothing,  I  wish,  however,  to 
make  plain  that  inexpensive  clothes  do  not 
imply  shabbiness  or  carelessness  in  personal 
appearance,  but  simply  that  the  blouse  of  the 
French  workman  is  better  than  the  dirty  linen 
shirt  of  the  American  workman.  To  be  appro- 
priately dressed  does  not,  in  these  days  of  cor- 
duroys and  flannel  shirts,  cost  either  much 
money  or  time,  and  the  man  who  allows  him- 
self and  his  children  to  go  dressed  as  scarecrows 
misses  one  element  for  good  in  country  life. 
Clothing  which  may  be  out  of  place  in  town 
may  become  just  the  thing  in  the  country  life, 
even  though  its  cost  is  insignificant  as  com- 
pared to  the  dress  of  the  city  man.  Were  my 
income  twenty  times  as  large  as  it  is,  I  should 
not  care  to  dress  better  than  I  do.  For  the 
children  blue-flannel  dresses  are  cheap,  but 
could  any  thing  be  more  appropriate  for  the 
life  on  the  water  which  they  lead  ? 

In  one  of  his  books  on  fishing,  Frank  Forester 
(H.  W.  Herbert)  says  that  if  he  led  the  life  of 
a  backwoodsman,  and  dwelt  in  a  cabin  on  top 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.   21$ 

of  a  mountain,  he  should  still  put  on  evening 
dress  for  dinner.  This  is  an  exaggeration,  but 
there  is  truth  behind.  Slovenly,  ill-fitting, 
dirty,  ragged  clothing  may  lead  to  slovenly 
habits  of  mind,  and  are  not  the  necessary 
accompaniments  of  such  life  as  I  prescribe. 

One  of  my  critics,  for  whom  I  have  great 
personal  deference,  tells  me  that  my  theory  of 
life  tends  to  a  relapse  into  barbarism,  and  in 
illustration  of  the  truth  of  his  position,  he 
pointed  one  evening  to  a  music-stand  near  the 
piano  with  the  remark :  "  With  your  ideas, 
that  stand  would  never  be  made  of  mahogany 
and  elaborately  ornamented,  but  would  be  of 
pine,  perhaps  stained." 

Well,  suppose  it  was.  I  am  inclined  to 
think  that  the  greater  use  of  common  material, 
stained  pine  and  other  cheap  wood,  in  the 
houses  of  people  of  taste  is  a  distinct  indication 
of  a  needed  reform.  Take  the  little  music- 
stand  in  illustration.  Its  purpose  is  to  hold  a 
number  of  music-books  and  loose  sheets  of 
music.  It  has  three  or  four  shelves,  and  is  so 
made  as  to  stand  in  a  corner  near  the  piano  and 
take  up  but  little  room.  It  is  made  of  mahog- 
any, highly  polished,  and  is  ornamented,  as 


2l6  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

most  people  would  call  it,  with  a  sort  of  stucco- 
beading,  which  to  me  is  distasteful.  But  it 
cost  money,  and  therefore  has  its  reasons  for 
being  in  certain  eyes.  I  have  forgotten  what 
it  cost  me — probably  from  fifteen  to  twenty 
dollars.  Thanks  to  the  growth  of  good  taste, 
I  can  to-day  pick  out  from  half-a-dozen  books 
I  know  of  a  little  design  for  a  music-stand,  or 
sketch  it  myself,  and  the  nearest  carpenter  will 
make  the  thing  in  a  day  at  a  cost  of  two  or 
three  dollars  for  wood,  labor,  and  staining. 
The  result  will  be  something  which  is  pleasanter 
to  my  eye,  and  I  will  venture  to  say  to  the  eyes  of 
nine  out  of  ten  persons  of  educated  taste.  The 
other  fifteen  or  sixteen  dollars  saved  may  be 
devoted  to  books,  pictures,  music — any  of  the 
things  which  really  add  something  to  life.  The 
music-stand  of  stained  pine  will  do  its  work 
just  as  well  as  the  one  made  of  mahogany, 
inlaid  with  stucco  beading — in  fact  it  will  do 
it  better,  for  it  will  not  need  a  periodic 
rubbing  on  the  part  of  the  parlor-maid  to  keep 
it  bright  and  polished,  and  it  can  be  moved 
about  when  occasion  demands,  as  it  weighs  but 
little.  It  is  as  strong  as  the  other,  and  it  will 
last  a  hundred  years. ' 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.  2lf 

The  music-stand  is  typical  of  the  whole 
theory  upon  which  I  have  preached  so  per- 
sistently and  to  some  extent  practised.  In 
every  affair  of  life,  we  have  been  insisting  upon 
mahogany,  with  stucco  trimmings,  and  wasting 
money  which  might  have  gone  far  towards  buy- 
ing books  and  sunlight.  It  is  a  hopeful  sign 
when  we  find  the  saving  remnant,  as  Matthew 
Arnold  has  it,  taking  to  stained  pine  instead 
of  mahogany  with  stucco  trimmings.  I  have 
a  sincere  love  for  pretty  things.  I  will  walk  a 
mile  to  see  a  set  of  china  exquisitely  decorated. 
Some  Persian  rugs  give  me  as  much  pleasure  as 
many  pictures.  A  noble  house  is  something 
that  I  should  like  to  own.  But  there  has 
always  been  the  question  :  Is  it  going  to  pay 
me  to  have  china  at  my  table  which  costs  one 
hundred  dollars,  or  a  rug  before  the  fire  which 
costs  half  as  much  again  ?  It  is  all  a  question 
of  whether  I  will  give  up  something  else.  Shall 
I  exchange  a  week  of  sunlight  for  the  sake  of 
that  dinner  service,  and  another  week  for  the 
sake  of  that  rug,  and  another  month  for  the 
sake  of  living  in  the  house  which  pleases  me, 
and  so  on.  After  weighing  the  losses  and  the 
gains  pretty  carefully,  I  say  No. 


218  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

A  far  more  serious  objection  which  is  made 
to  my  plan  of  life  is  that  it  is  not  fair  to  my 
children.  I  have  had  the  advantage  of  good 
schools,  I  have  been  sent  abroad  to  study,  I 
have  had  years  of  life  among  people  who  know 
something  of  books  and  art.  It  may  be  very 
well  for  me  to  desert  from  the  ranks,  and 
settle  down  in  the  woods,  intellectually  speak- 
ing, of  this  end  of  Long  Island.  This  is  a 
serious  question.  Had  I  never  conceived  the 
idea  of  seceding,  I  should  at  this  time  be  pay- 
ing rent  for  a  little  house  or  an  apartment 
in  some  part  of  New  York  City,  or  what  is 
more  likely  I  should  live  most  of  the  year  in 
some  of  the  little  settlements,  within  easy  rail- 
road distance  from  New  York,  which  dot  the 
Jersey  hills.  Years  ago,  before  my  eyes  were 
opened,  I  paid  seven  hundred  dollars  a  year  for 
a  cottage  in  just  such  a  settlement.  With  that 
expense  and  the  cost  of  three  months'  board  in 
New  York,  for  newspaper  work  makes  it  neces- 
sary for  me  to  be  in  New  York  at  least  that 
length  of  time,  I  may  say  that  my  rent  was 
about  a  thousand  dollars,  a  moderate  sum,  and 
yet  large  enough,  when  taken  in  connection 
with  the  other  expenses  of  servants  and  house- 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.    2 19 

keeping,  to  necessitate  pretty  steady  drudgery 
upon  my  part  the  year  round.  In  the  mean- 
time, my  children  attended  a  little  school  which 
was  quite  as  good  as  any  preparatory  school  of 
the  same  type  to  be  found  in  the  city. 

From  the  experience  that  I  have  had  with 
children's  schools,  I  have  been  led  to  think 
that  the  most  pretentious  are  often  the  least 
productive  of  any  good  to  the  child,  and  I  pre- 
sume that  most  parents  will  agree  in  condemn- 
ing the  ultra-fashionable  and  most  expensive 
schools  as  wonderfully  well  designed  to  make  a 
child  all  that  it  should  not  be.  With  the  pri- 
mary schools  there  is  scarcely  any  choice  to  be 
made  between  those  of  the  city  and  the  coun- 
try. The  home  life  of  the  child  before  twelve 
years  of  age  counts  for  so  much  in  forming  the 
character  and  the  intellectual  judgment  of  the 
child  that  schools,  good  or  bad,  are  not  of 
great  weight.  If  any  thing,  the  little,  unpre- 
tentious district  school  of  the  smallest  country 
village  is  better  than  the  city  school,  because 
there  are  fewer  children,  and  consequently 
their  idiosyncrasies  are  more  likely  to  have  full 
play.  The  worst  that  can  be  said  of  our  pub- 
lic-school system  is  that  it  tends  to  eliminate 


22O  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

individuality  and  make  each  child  the  counter- 
part of  the  standard  child,  often  a  very  low 
standard.  At  the  most  impressionable  age, 
we  send  our  children  to  schools  in  which  the 
effort  is  to  turn  out  boys  and  girls  all  knowing 
the  same  thing,  taking  the  same  view  of  every 
topic,  and  approaching  more  closely  to  a  type 
with  which  educated  persons  have  really  very 
little  sympathy.  It  is  a  standard  in  which  the 
commonplace  dominates.  Matthew  Arnold  at- 
tributed the  uninteresting  character  and  mo- 
notony of  much  of  the  casual  talk  which  he 
heard  in  our  public  places  to  the  universal  cus- 
tom of  sending  children  to  the  public  schools. 
Spencer  holds  that  there  is  no  harm,  but  rather 
good,  in  allowing  a  child  to  grow  up  a  healthy 
animal  almost  ignorant  of  ordinary  school  rudi- 
ments until  he  reaches  the  age  of  eight  or  ten. 
By  that  time  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  he  will  be 
less  plastic,  and  that  the  influence  of  home 
surroundings  will  have  brought  out  an  individu- 
ality not  to  be  effaced  by  the  routine  schooling 
of  the  next  few  years.  The  tendency  to  do 
away  with  book  lessons  for  young  children  has 
always  seemed  to  me  one  of  the  healthiest 
signs  of  the  day,  and  with  my  own  children 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.   221 

I  have  had  no  compunctions  of  conscience  in 
teaching  them  to  swim  and  row  and  to  love 
fishing  and  hunting  before  they  knew  how  to 
read  or  write  a  line.  The  worst  that  could 
happen  to  them  would  be  to  have  them  turn 
out  to  be  counterparts  of  the  commonplace 
type  I  find  in  most  of  the  public  schools.  The 
boy  who  at  the  age  of  twelve  is  a  good  swim- 
mer, a  good  sailor,  fond  of  shooting,  fishing, 
and  out-door  sports,  is  able  to  read  and  write, 
and  has  a  genuine  love  and  appreciation  of  a 
score  of  good  books,  and  not  a  little  good 
music,  is  pretty  sure  to  get  along  in  whatever 
school  he  finds  himself,  for  whatever  he  knows, 
he  will  know  thoroughly  and  not  superficially. 

The  real  school  is,  after  all,  the  home  school, 
of  which  the  father  and  mother  are  the  head 
teachers.  Here,  again,  is  one  reason  why  life 
in  the  wilderness  is  an  advantage  to  the  child. 
He  is  with  his  father  most  of  the  day,  and  if 
the  household  has  any  atmosphere  of  culture 
about  it,  he  is  pretty  sure  to  absorb  some  of  it. 
In  city  life,  the  father  may  be  seen  at  break- 
fast,  and  possibly  for  a  moment  before  the 
children  go  to  bed,  but  that,  as  a  rule,  is  all,  ex- 
cept on  Sunday,  when  he  is  often  too  tired  to 


222  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

bother  with  the  children  and  too  unfamiliar 
with  them  to  take  much  interest  in  their  do- 
ings. More  than  half  the  pleasure  that  I  get 
out  of  my  country  life  is  due  to  constant  asso- 
ciation with  the  children.  The  boat  seldom 
sails  away  without  three  or  four  of  them  on 
board,  they  are  never  left  behind  when  we 
start  for  a  day's  outing,  they  know  as  much 
about  the  garden  as  I  do,  and  probably  to  this 
active  open-air  life  they  owe  largely  their 
strength  and  ruddy  cheeks.  I  have  tried  both 
ways  of  life,  and  whatever  may  be  said  in  favor 
of  the  city  so  far  as  adults  are  concerned,  there 
are  no  two  ways  of  thinking  s*o  far  as  concerns 
the  children.  After  a  few  years,  when  it  be- 
comes necessary  to  fit  them  for  active  life,  I 
suppose  that  the  boys  will  go  to  college,  and  I 
am  not  at  all  afraid  of  their  ability  to  hold 
their  own  and  to  get  all  the  good  that  may  be 
obtained  by  a  struggle  for  wealth  if  they  should 
choose  to  strive  for  it.  As  to  the  girls,  it  may 
be  said  that  in  the  wilderness  they  would  grow 
up  ignorant  of  most  accomplishments  valued 
in  young  women,  such  as  music,  painting,  etc. 
But  here  again,  it  is  a  question  of  home  influ- 
ence. Inasmuch  as  my  girls  will  hear  at  home 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND   WHAT  WE  GAIN.   22$ 

twenty  times  as  much  good  music  as  the  aver- 
age New  York  girl  even  in  fashionable  life 
is  likely  to  hear,  and  a  hundred  times  as  much 
talk  about  it,  there  is  no  fear  that  if  they  have 
any  capacity  for  the  divine  art,  it  will  not  make 
itself  felt.  It  is  so  rare  to  find  among  even  our 
so-called  best  people  of  the  town  any  under- 
standing or  appreciation  of  the  meaning  and 
beauty  of  literature,  music,  and  art,  that  the 
fear  that  my  children  may  not  know  something 
of  these  things  because  they  do  not  habitually 
associate  with  these  so-called  best  people, 
seems  really  comical  to  me.  The  well-to-do 
people  of  the  city  will  spend  money  upon  any 
thing  but  art ;  they  will  cheerfully  lavish  dol- 
lars upon  mahogany  furniture  with  stucco 
veneering,  but  it  will  never  occur  to  them  to 
try  pine  and  have  their  children  taught  to 
understand  a  Beethoven  sonata.  It  has  been 
said  that  under  such  a  system  as  mine  my 
boys  are  likely  to  grow  up  fishermen,  and 
nothing  more,  and  that  my  girls  will  probably 
know  how  to  make  good  butter.  Even  taking 
this  material  view  of  the  matter,  I  am  not  at 
all  sure  but  that  an  intelligent  fisherman  who 
lives  in  comfort  the  year  round,  harassed  by 


224  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

no  anxieties,  and  getting  the  most  out  of 
the  sea-breeze  and  the  sunlight,  has  not  a  far 
better  lot  than  his  city  brother  who  wears 
more  expensive  clothes  and  talks  about  the 
price  of  lard  or  leather  instead  of  the  fish  and 
the  tides.  As  to  the  essentials  of  intellectual 
culture,  the  fisherman  with  a  taste  for  reading 
and  his  long  winter  evenings  has  by  far  the 
greater  opportunities. 

With  regard  to  the  physical  advantages  of 
country  life  modern  science  has  brought  statis- 
tics to  bear.  Not  a  physician  can  be  found 
who  does  not  preach  the  value  of  better  air 
than  can  be  found  in  cities. 

Upon  this  subject  Dr.  G.  B.  Barren,  in  a 
paper  entitled  "  Town-Life  as  a  Cause  of  De- 
generacy," read  at  a  recent  meeting  of  the 
British  Association,  at  Bath,  England,  said : 

"  I  venture  to  advance  the  proposition  that 
the  '  vital  force  '  of  the  town-dweller  is  inferior 
to  the  '  vital  force  '  of  the  countryman.  The 
evidence  of  this  is  to  be  found  in  a  variety  of 
ways.  The  general  unfitness  and  incapability 
of  the  dwellers  in  our  large  hives  of  industry  to 
undergo  continued  violent  exertion,  or  to  sus- 
tain long  endurance  of  fatigue,  is  a  fact  requir- 
ing little  evidence  to  establish  ;  nor  can  they 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.    22$ 

tolerate  the  withdrawal  of  food  under  sustained 
physical  effort  for  any  prolonged  period  as  com- 
pared with  the  dwellers  in  rural  districts.  It 
may  be  affirmed  also  that,  through  the  various 
factors  at  work  night  and  day  upon  the  consti- 
tution of  the  poorer  class  of  town-dwellers, 
various  forms  of  disease  are  developed,  of 
which  pulmonary  consumption  is  the  most 
familiar,  and  which  is  doing  its  fatal  work  in  a 
lavish  and  unerring  fashion.  Thus  it  may  be 
conceded  as  an  established  fact  that  the  towns- 
man is,  on  the  whole,  constitutionally  dwarfed 
in  tone,  and  his  life,  man  for  man,  shorter, 
weaker,  and  more  uncertain  than  the  country- 
man's. I  hold  the  opinion  that  the  deteriora- 
tion is  more  in  physique,  as  implied  in  the  loss 
of  physical  or  muscular  power  of  the  body,  the 
attenuation  of  muscular  fibre,  the  loss  of  integ- 
rity of  cell-structure,  and  consequent  liability 
to  the  invasion  of  disease,  rather  than  in  actual 
stature  of  inch-measurement.  The  true  causes 
of  this  deterioration  are  neither  very  obscure  nor 
far  to  seek.  They  are  bad  air  and  bad  habits. 

"  Taking  these  causes  in  the  order  in  which 
I  have  placed  them,  but  without  reference  to 
their  relative  intensity,  I  think  bad  air  is  a 
potent  factor  of  enfeeblement.  Included  in 
the  phrase  '  bad  air '  are  bad  sanitation  and 
overcrowding.  I  have  no  doubt  in  my  mind 
that  it  has  a  powerful  and  never-ceasing  action, 
paramount  and  decisive,  on  the  physical  frames 


226  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

of  young  and  old  town-dwellers,  producing 
deterioration  of  physique,  lowered  vitality,  and 
constitutional  decay.  For  over  thirty  years  I 
have  been  hammering  away  at  this  question  of 
'  bad  air '  and  '  bad  sanitation  '  as  the  prime 
causes  of  impairment  of  health  and  race,  and 
the  more  I  consider  it  the  more  I  am  con- 
vinced of  the  soundness  of  my  conclusions.  A 
great  deal  has  been  said  on  this  subject,  and  it 
is  not  difficult  to  adduce  conclusive  evidence 
from  a  large  variety  of  reliable  sources  in  proof 
of  the  deleterious  effects  of  impure  air  on  the 
animal  economy.  Consumption  is  the  best 
type  of  degenerative  action  and  loss  of  vital 
energy.  It  stands  out  in  bold  relief  as  the 
disease  most  rife  wherever  foul  air  exists.  The 
significance  and  value  of  fresh  air  were  recog- 
nized by  the  old  fathers  of  medicine.  Hippo- 
crates was  accustomed  to  advise  a  walk  in  fresh 
air  of  ten  or  fifteen  miles  daily.  Aretasus,  Cel- 
sus,  and  Pliny  speak  of  the  good  effect  of  fresh 
air;  and  our  great  English  physician,  Syden- 
ham,  did  the  same  thing.  Dr.  Guy  found  that 
of  104  compositors  who  worked  in  rooms  of 
less  than  500  cubic  feet  of  air  for  each  person, 
12.5  per  cent,  had  had  spitting  of  blood  ;  of 
115  in  rooms  of  from  500  to  600  cubic  feet, 
4.35  per  cent,  showed  signs  of  consumption  ; 
and  in  100  who  worked  in  rooms  of  more  than 
600  cubic  feet  capacity,  less  than  2  per  cent, 
had  spit  blood.  Consumption  is  only  one  of 


WHAT  WE  LOSE  AND  WHAT  WE   GAIN.   227 

the  long  list  of  evils  to  which  the  town-dweller 
is  exposed.  It  may  be  well  to  mention  that 
the  Labrador  fishermen  and  the  fishermen  of 
the  Hebrides,  with  plenty  of  fresh  air,  are 
practically  exempt  from  this  disease.  The 
absence  of  pure  air  acts  upon  the  animal  econ- 
omy in  much  the  same  way  as  the  withdrawal 
of  light  on  plants,  the  result  being  pallor  and 
feebleness  of  constitutional  vigor.  This  effect 
ramifies  in  every  direction ;  the  tissues  of 
which  the  human  body  is  composed  lose  their 
tonicity  and  contractile  power,  and  even  men- 
tal integrity  may  be  more  or  less  affected.  The 
pent-up  denizens  of  the  courts  and  alleys  of  our 
large  towns,  surrounded  on  every  side  by  im- 
perfect light,  bad  air,  and  the  general  aspects 
of  low  life,  necessarily  degenerate  in  physical 
competency,  and  their  offspring  is  of  a  feeble 
type. 

"  The  digestive  capability  of  the  town-dweller 
is  of  a  lower  standard  and  less  capable  of  deal- 
ing with  the  ordinary  articles  of  diet,  than  the 
latter.  Consequently  town-dwellers  live  on 
such  food  as  they  can  digest  without  suffering 
—bread,  fish,  and  meat  ;  above  all,  the  last. 
The  sapid,  tasty  flesh  of  animals  which  sits 
lightly  upon  the  stomach,  gives  an  acceptable 
feeling  of  satiety,  so  pleasant  to  experience. 
Such  selection  is  natural  and  intelligible,  but  it 
is  fraught  with  danger.  I  quote  from  a  former 
paper :  '  The  chief  diet  selected  by  the  town- 


228  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

dweller  begets  a  condition  known  to  doctors  as 
the  uric-acid  diathesis,  with  its  many  morbid 
consequences.  Pulmonary  phthisis  and  Bright's 
disease  seem  Dame  Nature's  means  of  weeding 
out  degenerating  town-dwellers.'  Such  are 
some  of  the  medical  aspects  of  the  case." 

Mr.  Henry  T.  Finck,  says  in  his  "  Roman- 
tic Love  and  Personal  Beauty  "  : 

"  I  am  convinced  from  many  experiments  that 
the  value  of  country  air  lies  partly  in  its  tonic 
fragrance,  partly  in  the  absence  of  depressing 
foul  odors.  Now  the  tonic  value  of  fragrant 
meadow  or  forest  air  lies  in  this — that  it  causes 
us  involuntarily  to  breathe  deeply,  in  order 
to  drink  in  as  many  mouthfuls  of  this  luscious 
aerial  Tokay  as  possible  ;  whereas  in  the  city 
the  air  is, — well,  say  unfragrant  and  uninviting, 
and  the  constant  fear  of  gulping  down  a  pint  of 
deadly  sewer-gas  discourages  deep  breathing. 
The  general  pallor  and  nervousness  of  New 
York  people  have  often  been  noticed.  The 
cause  is  obvious.  New  York  has  the  dirtiest 
streets  of  any  city  in  the  world,  except  Con- 
stantinople and  Canton  ;  and,  moreover,  it  is 
surrounded  by  oil-refineries,  which  sometimes 
for  days  poison  the  whole  city  with  the  stifling 
fumes  of  petroleum,  so  that  one  hardly  dares  to 
breathe  at  all." 


THE  DANGERS  OF  CUTTING  LOOSE  FROM  TOWN 
DRUDGERY. 

'"THE  late  Matthew  Arnold  found  nothing 
more  characteristic  to  say  about  us  than 
that  we  Americans  and  our  institutions  are  un- 
interesting. The  length  of  our  railroads,  our 
piles  of  money,  our  big  buildings,  our  vast 
spaces  on  land  and  water  did  not  impress  him. 
The  human  interest  was  lacking  partly  because 
so  much  of  our  time  or  attention  and  our  talk 
was  taken  up  with  these  other  material  matters 
in  themselves  not  peculiarly  interesting.  Sir 
Lepel  Griffin,  in  a  harsher  review  of  us  and  our 
institutions,  says  that  he  would  rather  live  al- 
most anywhere  than  here,  and  again  he  remarks 
that  we  are  uninteresting.  As  a  nation,  we  may 
have  attained  to  a  higher  level  in  material  mat- 
ters than  the  great  nations  of  the  Old  World ; 
but  the  work  of  our  public  schools  in  turning 
out  vast  armies  of  pupils,  knowing  all  the  same 
things  and  viewing  every  thing  from  the  same 
229 


230  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

standpoint,  necessarily  implies  monotony.  In 
our  views  of  what  makes  a  life  worth  living 
there  is  pretty  certain  to  be  a  good  deal  of  this 
monotony.  Ask  half  a  hundred  men  and 
women,  taken  at  random,  what  makes  life 
worth  living,  and  certainly  the  great  majority 
will  say  that  a  life  of  luxurious  idleness  offers 
the  greatest  opportunities.  At  least  this  is 
what  they  mean,  although  they  will  hesitate  to 
use  the  word  idleness,  as  contrary  to  good 
morals.  Given  good  health  and  an  ample  in- 
come, that  life  is  worth  living — to  the  liver  at 
least — may  be  considered  as  sure  to  follow  in 
the  general  estimation  of  people.  Nevertheless 
most  of  us  can  point  out  some  people  who  have 
health  and  more  money  than  they  know  what 
to  do  with,  and  yet  do  not  live  a  life  which  we 
consider  the  best  that  they  could  lead. 

I  will  define  a  life  worth  living  as  the  one 
which  offers  out-door  work  and  sport,  freedom 
from  anxiety,  and  plenty  of  intellectual  exer- 
^0     cise.     I  doubt  whether  a  man  who  passes  more 
JL  /*v  than  three  fourths  of  his  waking  hours  in-doors 
****Yv\can  remam  a  healthy  animal  or  get  the  enjoy- 
ment out  of  life  which  the  mere  sense  of  physi- 
cal well-being  gives.     The  doctors  tell  us  that 


TOWN  DRUDGERY.  231 

the  physical  trend  of  people  who  live  in  great 
cities  is  one  of  steady  deterioration  ;  the  cities 
must  be  constantly  recruited  from  the  country. 
To  me  the  persistent  city  man  who  never  goes 
beyond  the  brick  walls  and  paved  streets  is  en- 
titled to  pity  very  much  upon  the  same  ground 
as  are  the  animals  we  see  in  our  menageries. 
Centuries  of  wrong  living  have  evolved  a  people 
who  stand  confinement  and  bad  air  wonderfully 
well,  but  Nature  takes  her  revenge  in  one  way 
or  another.  Nevertheless,  we  stand  our  arti- 
ficial existence  so  well  that  most  of  us  forget 
that  it  is  an  artificial  existence.  As  animals  we 
ought,  by  rights,  to  be  in  the  sunlight  from 
morning  till  night.  Our  ancestors  of  a  few 
thousand  years  ago,  who  foraged  the  woods 
and  waters  for  birds  and  fish  which  they  de- 
voured raw,  slept  well  in  their  caves  after  the 
day's  chase,  and  knew  nothing  of  half  the  ills 
we  now  live  in  dread  of.  When  Thoreau  notes 
that  the  sports  of  civilized  man  were  the  labors 
of  uncivilized  man,  does  he  not  indict  civiliza- 
tion ?  Man  has  given  up  play  as  a  means  of 
getting  a  living.  To  some  extent  we  go  back 
to  the  rational  life  when  we  can.  The  rich 
Wall  Street  gambler,  the  rich  dealer  in  lard  or 


232  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

leather  sometimes  goes  back  to  the  woods  in 
summer  or  ploughs  the  wave  in  his  yacht.  But 
very  few  of  us  get  rich — perhaps  one  in  a  thou- 
sand. Is  there  no  way  of  getting  back  to  a 
rational  life  without  first  winning  a  fortune, 
something  which  comes  to  so  few  ? 

I  am  aware  that  here  many  a  reader — pro- 
vided I  am  so  fortunate  as  to  have  many  readers 
— will  say  :  "  Oh,  we  have  heard  all  this  before  ; 
it  is  the  old  story  of  moving  to  the  country  in 
order  to  raise  cabbages  for  a  living.  It  is  one 
more  variation  upon  the  '  Ten  Acres  Enough  ' 
idea."  To  some  extent  it  is  a  variation  upon 
that  famous  book,  but  with  a  difference.  The 
hundreds  of  writers  who  have  taken  up  the  chief 
idea  of  "  Ten  Acres  Enough  " — the  possibility 
of  earning  a  livelihood  by  out-door  work,  gar- 
dening, fishing,  etc.,  have,  without  exception,  so 
far  as  I  know,  begun  with  the  assumption  that 
when  life  becomes  impossible  in  town  then  the 
country  should  be  sought.  In  one  case  it  is  the 
broken-down  merchant,  tired  of  meeting  notes, 
tired  of  the  long  struggle  to  ward  off  bank- 
ruptcy, who  finally  says  to  himself :  "  I  will  sell 
out  my  business  and  with  the  proceeds  buy  a 
strawberry  patch,  upon  which  I  can  raise  enough 


TOWN  DRUDGERY.  233 

i 

fruit  to  support  my  family  in  comfort."  And  he 
does  it — in  the  book.  Again,  it  is  the  family  of 
the  merchant  who  dies  bankrupt  who  give  up 
their  city  house  in  order  to  find  pleasure  and 
profit  in  keeping  cows  and  selling  butter  at  a 
dollar  a  pound — in  the  book.  I  have  quite  a 
collection  of  books  written  by  enthusiasts  upon 
country  life,  and  I  know  some  persons  who 
have  acted  upon  the  suggestions  given,  some- 
times with  very  unfortunate  results.  But  in- 
variably this  country  life  is  considered  as  an 
asylum.  So  long  as  a  man  can  live  in  the  city 
and  pay  his  notes  and  buy  dresses  for  the  fam- 
ily, it  is  not  for  him  to  think  of  trying  the 
country.  The  man  who  falls  behind  in  the 
race  is  advised  to  retreat  to  the  country  and 
take  to  strawberry  raising. 

I  contend  that  the  strawberry  raising  or 
whatever  outdoor  work  is  chosen  as  a  means 
for  making  a  livelihood  should  be  preferred, 
taken  all  in  all,  to  the  city  life  even  if  this  city 
life  is  fairly  successful  in  a  commercial  sense, 
and  I  hold  this  for  the  simple  reason  that  it 
offers  emancipation  from  some  of  the  worst  of 
city  evils,  while  its  drawbacks — and  there  are 
drawbacks — are  insignificant  as  compared  to 


234  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

the  advantages  gained.  Take  half  a  dozen  of 
the  most  successful  city  men  you  know  and 
consider  (i)  How  much  healthy  exercise  in  the 
sunshine  they  have  ;  (2)  How  much  of  their 
life  is  passed  with  their  children  and  family  ;  (3) 
How  much  intellectual  exercise  do  they  get  out 
of  life,  how  many  books  worth  reading  do  they 
open  in  the  course  of  the  year  ? 

In  olden  times,  and  in  fact  in  recent  times 
until  the  power  press  and   cheap  postage  ap- 
peared, the  dweller  in  the  country  was  largely 
cut  off  from  intellectual  intercourse.     He  had 
1 ";  his  few  books,  as  a  rule  costly  and  therefore 

T  * 

few,  and  that  was  all.     To-day,  no  matter  how 
'-'     distant  the  hamlet,  the  mail  reaches  it,  and  for 
. .  -    a  trifle   the  newspapers   and  magazines  bring 
•  due -him  the  best  thoughts  of  the  world  together 
I    £yU.  with  a  record  of  what  men  who  like  the  fuss 
and  the  noise   of  towns  are   doing.     It  is   no 
longer  necessary   to  live  with   the    throng   in 
.order  to  know  what  is  going  on  where  crowds 
meet,  and  all   signs  go    to  show    that    in    the 
future  it  will  be  still  less  necessary.     The  phon- 
ograph, to  speak  of  but  one  wonder  of  the  near 
future,  offers  extraordinary  things  to  the  man 
/•       who  wants  to  get  away  from  the  crowd.     The 


V 


TOWN  DRUDGERY.  235 

perfected    phonograph,   and  there  can   be   no 
reasonable  doubt  as  to   its  future    perfection, 
whether  this  is  achieved  a  year  or  twenty  years  '***  Htn 
hence,  will  not  only  give  us  books  at  a  cost  m-^*^-  * 
significant    as    compared   to  that   of  ink   ancr^*  ^ 
paper,  but  in  a  far  pleasanter  form  ;  it  will  be  a^.*^ 
pleasant  reader  always  ready   to  read  by  the 
hour  or  the  day.     Not  only  this,  but  it  will  give,^. 
us  music  of  any  kind — the  latest  song  or  the^^f  ^ 
newest  orchestral  symphony  in  a  manner  to  be 
enjoyed  even  by  experts.     So  much  has  been 
accomplished  with  the  phonograph  that  nothing 
seems  to  be  too  extraordinary  to  claim  for  it. 
It  is  no  dream  to  say  that  as  a  means  of  com- 
municating thoughts  and   words,   the    phono- 
graph will  do  more  for  the  world  as  an  educa- 
tor than  printing.     In  the  future,  authors  will/^*-*-' 
not  write  their  books — they  will  read  them,  and  'Jl*n  •' 
phonographic   copies  of  the  result  will  be  so  "tu  ' 
cheap  that  our  books  of  to-day  will  seem  ex- 
travagantly  dear  in  comparison.     With  music 
it  will  be  the  same  thing,  only  that  the  phono- 
graph will  do  in  this  field  what   it  has  never 
been  possible  to  do  before.     To  provide  for  the 
intellectual  food  of   man   was   formerly  more 
difficult  than  to  provide  for  his  physical  suste- 


236  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

nance.  To-day  it  is  the  other  way.  In  the 
future,  thanks  to  electricity,  that  great  power 
of  coming  ages  by  which  the  forces  of  nature 
are  to  be  harnessed,  food  and  clothing  and 
every  thing  that  machinery  can  make  will  be 
inconceivably  cheap.  Some  thinkers  believe 
that  even  by  the  year  2000  one  hour's  work  a 
day  will  suffice  to  give  a  man  more  comforts 
» fCc  and  luxuries  than  he  now  earns  by  eight  or  ten 
hours'  work.  It  will  be  argued  of  course,  that 
what  man  considers  his  necessaries  will  grow 
faster  than  his  means  for  supplying  them :  in 
those  favored  days  to  come  the  day  laborer 
will  deem  himself  unfortunate  if  he  cannot 
dwell  in  marble  halls  and  eat  off  gold  plate. 
Nevertheless  there  is  a  point  when  we  can  say 
that  a  man  is  well  sheltered  from  the  elements, 
well  clothed,  well  fed ;  intellectual  food  in  the 
shape  of  books  and  newspapers  will  then  be  so 
cheap  as  to  be  scarcely  worth  considering.  It 
is  probable  that  in  those  days  people  will  not 
herd  together  at  the  sacrifice  of  sunshine  and 
quiet. 

The  workman  of  to-day  earns  by  his  day's 
labor  twice  as  much  food  and  four  times  as 
much  manufactured  goods — clothes,  tools,  fur- 


TOWN  DRUDGERY. 


niture  —  as  his  father  did  in  the  same  time. 
When  we  come  to  books  and  newspapers  the 
contrast  is  more  astonishing.  The  average  me- 
chanic can  now  buy  for  one  day's  work  more 
books  than  a  month's  work  would  have  brought 
him  a  century  ago,  or  a  year's  work  would  have 
brought  him  in  the  Middle  Ages.  More  than 
that,  thanks  to  cheap  postage  and  circulating 
libraries,  books  are  to  be  had  almost  for  the 
asking.  One  of  the  things  that  the  Govern- 
ment could  do  for  the  intellectual  growth  of 
the  country  would  be  to  make  the  postage  upon 
books  almost  nominal.  This  is  done  in  the 
case  of  newspapers,  which  are  sent  through  the 
mails  to  subscribers  for  one  cent  a  pound  ;  but 
in  the  case  of  books,  postage  is  still  exorbitant. 
That  there  are  certain  deprivations  in  living 
in  the  country,  especially  in  isolation,  goes 
without  saying.  First  and  chief  my  critics  are 
pretty  certain  to  note  the  absence  of  all  society, 
certainly  a  loss  if  one's  position  in  city  life 
is  such  as  to  give  him  the  society  of  cultured 
people  and  the  time  to  enjoy  such  society. 
Nor  is  the  raising  of  cabbages  or  strawberries 
for  market  by  any  means  a  life  of  luxurious 
idleness.  Even  where,  as  in  my  case,  the 


238  LIBERTY  AND  A   LIVING. 

object  is  not  to  earn  money,  but  to  save  it, 
there  are  early  hours,  soiled  hands,  and  .a  tired 
back ;  some  of  my  friends  to  whom  I  have 
expounded  the  gospel  of  idleness,  as  they  call 
it,  although  I  see  nothing  of  idleness  in  the 
raising  of  cabbages  and  strawberries,  say  that 
just  in  proportion  to  my  success  as  a  straw- 
berry grower  will  be  my  loss  in  other  directions. 
They  say  that  a  day  of  hard  physical  labor  in 
the  fields  will  not  end  with  the  reading  of  a 
good  book  or  magazine  article,  but  in  dozing 
off  at  eight  o'clock.  Farmers  must  keep 
farmers'  hours.  I  have  made  some  experiments 
in  this  field.  I  have  found  that  whether  or 
not  we  go  to  bed  at  nine  o'clock  depends 
wholly  upon  whether  we  accustom  ourselves 
to  going  to  bed  at  that  hour.  It  may  re- 
quire at  first  some  exertion  and  many  yawns 
to  get  through  a  certain  book  or  an  article, 
especially  if  it  is  a  stupid  one,  before  going  to 
bed.  But  it  will  get  easier  and  easier  until  the 
day  will  not  seem  to  be  properly  wound  up 
without  the  two  hours'  reading.  The  family 
circle  in  which  reading  aloud  in  not  one  of  the 
customary  evening  employments  misses  one  of 
the  great  enjoyments  of  life  as  well  as  a  potent 


TOWN  DRUDGERY.  239 

means  of  educating  the  children.  The  boy 
and  girl  who  learns  to  know  and  love  the  best 
books  of  Thackeray,  Scott,  and  Dickens  is  pret- 
ty sure  to  have  an  interest  in  good  reading 
through  life.  But  the  habit  of  reading  for  an 
hour  every  evening  and  perhaps  devoting  half 
an  hour  to  some  standard  work  not  a  novel,  is 
not  to  be  cultivated  without  some  effort,  and 
some  sacrifice  in  other  directions.  One  of  the 
most  valuable  gifts  of  a  liberal  education  is  the 
ability  to  find  an  interest  in  books.  Unfor- 
tunately, but  very  few  people  know  how  to 
read.  The  great  number  have  never  learned 
when  young ;  when  in  middle  life  their  time 
has  been  too  much  taken  up  with  money- 
making  ;  when  the  money  was  made  and  there 
was  plenty  of  time,  the  faculty  of  finding 
interest  in  things  above  every-day  detail  had 
died  for  want  of  cultivation. 

THE  END. 


Ttc  Vt-to^w.     fu£.  Ub^ 

kXyCl     «Ut/«A>lI~f    4d 

TTT.y.^/  ftL 
^c    f 

«>U^WO. 

^  / 


"A  LITTLE  WONDER." 

THE   POCKET  ATLAS  OF  THE  WORLD. 

A  Comprehensive  and  Popular  Series  of 
54  Maps,  illustrating  Political  and  Physical 
Geography.  Prepared  by  JOHN  BARTHOLO- 
MEW, F.R.G.S.  Beautifully  printed  in 
32mo,  cloth  extra,  $i  ;  full  leather,  $1.50. 

"A  great  marvel  in  a  small  compass." — Chicago  Ad- 
vance. 

"_A  most  inviting  little  tome,  .  .  .  legible  and  in- 
telligible."— N.  y.  Commercial  Advertiser. 

"  One  of  the  most  convenient  little  books  ever  pub- 
lished. .  .  .  It  is  a  little  marvel  of  full  and  compact 
information,  and  its  maps  are  excellent." — Chicago 
Tribune. 

"  A  decidedly  'cute  pocket  atlas." — Cincinnati  Com- 
mercial Gazette. 

"  Nothing  more  reliable  and  convenient  in  its  way  has 
yet  appeared." — Boston  Globe. 

"  Mr.  Bartholomew  as  a  geographist  is  a  sufficient 
guaranty  of  its  accuracy  as  well  as  value." — The 
Churchman. 

'Its  singularly  tasteful  and  handy  shape — a  necessity 
10  the  traveller  and  all  who  '  live  in  trunks,'  while  ex- 
ceedingly convenient  to  a\\."—Congregationalist. 

"His  refreshing  to  find  a  thing  so  new,  so  unique,  so 
correct,  so  serviceable.  .  .  .  It  is  all  it  purports  to  be, 
and  is  more  and  better  than  any  one  would  suspect  from 
the  title  or  from  any  review  that  could  be  given  it.  It  is 
what  every  student  has  wanted,  what  every  office  and 
home  need.  We  would  not  be  without  it,  personally,  for 
several  times  its  price." — Boston  Journal  of  Education. 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS, 

37  and  29  West  23^  Street,  New  York  ;  and 

27  King  William  St.,  Strand,  London. 


THE 

HAND-BOOK  DICTIONARY 

A  Practical  and   Conversational    Dictionary  of 
the    English,  French,  and    German    Lan- 
guages in  Parallel  Columns.     By  GEORGE 
F.  CHAMBERS,  F.R.A.      i8mo,    roan,  pp. 
xiii.  +  724.     $2.00. 
"Altogether  satisfactory." — London  Times. 
"  An  excellent  hand-book  for  traveller  or  student." — 
N.  Y.  Tribune. 

"  Thoroughly    well    done.     .     .     .     Must    prove    w^ry 
useful. ' ' — Congregations  list. 

"  Simple  in  construction  and  comprehensive   in  char- 
acter."—Edinburgh  Scotsman. 

"  It  is  literally  a  hand-book." — N.  Y.  Critic. 
"  To  a  tourist  through   France  or  Germany  it  is  in- 
dispensable.    It  is  the  best  work  of  the  kind  that  has 
come  into  our  hands." — Indianapolis  Journal. 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS, 

27  and  29  West   23d   Street,  New  York ;  and 

27  King  William  St.,  Strand,  London. 


s 


Hi  3 


THE  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW. 


f 


- — 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


000  562  920     9 


